01

“I hate fiction.”

With both hands she clasps the styrofoam cup of coffee. Hiding her chin and lips. Jacket all ratty but a lot better than the most of them.

“Why?” I ask.

She tries to take another sip, but twitches. Some lukewarm coffee drips around and down her thumbs. Her half-drooping eyes follow the forming path.

“You wouldn’t get it.”

The drop plummets upon her ripped jeans. Near the stain she scratches at her exposed thigh.

“I think I would get it. You’ve got a sympathetic position. It’s a ridiculous thing.”

Still staring down she digs her fingernails into her thigh more. Blood starts to form. I figure I have nothing left to lose.

“I mean, it’s all fake, right? That’s probably why you hate it. It’s fake, and yet it doesn’t deter anyone from reading more of it. Mistaking it with reality. So then the readers get funny ideas about how we’re supposed to be and act. What it means to live. What makes this world so garbage or utopia-to-be.

“There’s nothing admirable about it. It’s a sign of some disturbance. And then you let whatever author lead you down labyrinths with nonsense. Filled with dead ends, these authors. They live the same day, everyday, and then have this audacity to think they got something to say. What is there to learn from someone who doesn’t do anything? Who doesn’t live? Oh they sure guess at how their characters will. In their completely arbitrarily strung situations, perfectly set and shut. What’s the point?”

Leaning back, hands stable against the seat bench, she switches her staring toward the ceiling. Absent, vacant. I press onward.

“They give you ideas about how it all ought to work, but not really. Of the stuff they’re right about, well, that’s just the programming. If you read through some of the declassified press you’d know how it all ramped up with the movies. Stringing the people through visual example until surely distant from their original selves. From how they’re supposed to be.”

Leveling her blank gaze she seems to resist an eyerolling, but I can’t say for certain. Meanwhile the attendant steps forward and taps his Casio at me. It’s hard to say who I’m talking to anymore.

“Well maybe that’s half the problem, isn’t it? I guess we left any supposing in Eden. Now we’re all stuck here copying each other. But I figure if you block enough of the nonsense out there’s something… churning within. Waiting to be noticed.”

“Alright, that’s enough,” he states.

She stares a bit at me, blankly, and then silently rises from the cafeteria picnic table. A chic-grey top. Watching her saunter toward the East wing I notice how little bothered I am. About how she never says goodbye, of course. Or about the circular coffee stain-to-be pooling, as though she could’ve tossed the cup: there isn’t a garbage bin in convenient reach. Her silhouette turns the hall corner, attendant trailing behind. It’ll be another two weeks until the next meeting.

Planting both hands on my knees I stammer up and toward the visitor’s entrance wing. West. The joining cafeteria is quite barren, but as soon as you exit through the double-push doors so the connecting hall is adorned with memorabilia. I figure all the displays to be predominantly from the 1940s, but I guess with each exchange of hands so each owner added five items, obscuring any theme or sensibility.

I’m not sure what to call the place. It’s not a hospital. Not an insane asylum. It was a lofty estate and no one knows who originally commissioned it, but with some government funding it turned into this.

It’s an adult orphanage, I guess. Almost. Like a spiritual orphanage. That was my little sister, after all.

I’m not sure what started it or why. The first few news cycles downplayed it. Isolated cases, and because there aren’t any signs any different than the usual disengaged affect. So it flew under the radar, but it didn’t take long for it to be endemic.

It starts off the same as anyone would guess. Who wouldn’t like a small break? Who wouldn’t? And who doesn’t feel a little lazy? There doesn’t seem to be much point to all of the work anyway.

But it rapidly takes over, and they hide in their room more. Get some answering in half sentences. They look through you, to some place you’d never guess. Though every time I turned around it was only her bedroom door.

The best way I can describe it to you is like talking to someone with a thick slab of glass between. If you stare at the lips maybe you can make out what they’re saying, but even if you accomplish that, you’d have to pin your hopes on how they’d do the same for you. But she rarely does, and frankly I don’t blame her.

And I get nervous about not blaming her. That I’m turning into her. How it spreads by repeated contact. But I figure it’s a two-way street and, well, whether my current condition is something to long for or not at least I give her the opportunity to entertain it. To entertain “returning”.

The West wing is mostly empty. After a good few steps through the connecting hall you see this circular… artery. The crimson carpeting doesn’t help. Forest green walls with three other doors to go through, stairs central and curved upward too, but only the one on the left is open.

This place is built a little strange. It’s on a cliffside, at the edge of town. Perfectly reasonable for the eccentric that built the place but, instead of being parallel to the cliff and sea ahead, it’s orthogonal. The East wing hugs the sea while the West is the gateway to the grounds and the middle got refashioned as a cafeteria. Where all the visitations take place. And though there is, in fact, an “entrance” to the middle arena it’s a bunch of steps that stop abruptly somewhere in the forest surrounding most of the estate.

Maybe there’s something more in the West wing, but I wouldn’t know. Regardless I shuffle through the propped door and hustle down the concrete steps all recently built and uncomfortably devoid of stained gum. About two hundred steps I’d guess, and pretty wide before it converges toward the singular door. It feels like visiting a monument, or at least it reminds me of them.

The officials can’t explain why these orphanage gatherings work. I don’t like the name they gave the participants, patients, whatever, and I purposely avoid it, but the news started labelling them “Trivens”. But she’s just my goddamn sister.

Maybe she’s happier so disassociated with this reality. We had to transfer her because she was limp most of the time. She wouldn’t even budge for some pretzels. Soft and salty, with lots of butter. We used to look forward to them together, back in the Mall days, though after pleading with her to just please finish half, no, a quarter slice or a cinnamon variant, enmeshed with raisins, I had to check.

Parting her hair so I saw the signature Triven’s mark: an upside-down triangle, some purple stained metal, in the center back of the neck. A few days later I witnessed it. I was trying my luck with tapioca, but with an ajar door I peered in and saw her. She was leaned up against the wall, sitting on her bed, a little crooked but fixed. It was unsettling, and then I could see her face. Her eyes were the typically reported peeled back and wide and seemed to tremble in the sockets, half transparent and superimposed movements. While you feel no presence. Like an animated mannequin, before a deep breath and fainting.

Later reports suggest it seems to siphon their vitality, half-way confirmed through biomarkers and energy levels, and only the East wing reduces its occurrence. Physics can’t explain why it looks what it looks like when they shake. But, regardless, the only way to get them to eat again is a transfer to these orphanages.

I think that triangle seems to represent a tether to some other place, though no one else dares to say it. That’s how it feels when interacting with them. That I become the visitor.

And maybe that’s how everyone else feels too, looking at the parking lot. My bent 2006 Corolla waits right by the beginning steps, and with a quick scan I count about ten other vehicles. I’m not sure how many are “checked in” the facility, and honestly I don’t want to know.

Hopping in the car I avoid turning on the radio. I used to tune in, almost religious about it, hoping for a better explanation and “cure” awaiting, but usually you get theorizers. Quotes of Revelations, latent psychic ability suggestions, or the first of many extended greetings from a wayfaring civilization. After awhile I realized this isn’t going away soon. There’s no use listening.

It’s been a year since officially declared, and it feels like bedlam, but it’s also eerie and quiet wherever you go. Officials debate on what to do, as it’s swallowing up most of the able-bodied. A friend of mine last week caught it, or manifested it, or whatever you want to suggest all this is. And my typical office cubicle company and its employees dwindle the same slow leaking you’d find in a cave thawing. Imperceptible, but a “resignation” inevitably reminds us. Reminds us how everything seems to be melting.

But was the status-quo a year prior that much better? This is how this stuff messes with me, because a year ago she seemed to be disengaged simply, and maybe rightfully. The same as anyone adjusting to how modern life works. You learn concessions, you learn and savor the small wins. Promised the world but given something half bent.

She drifted through university. Somedays she’d really convince me she finally found something. Some future of hers. Always so good at acting. I guess it’s in the family, since I remember doing the same before accepting my mediocre march of shuffling papers and suggesting proposals to be vetoed before working on legacy Visual Basic scripts. Scripts that affects maybe five people total.

What bothers me the most is, though I confess I’m not sure who I am visiting when I do go, what’s gets me is how I’m not even sure I knew my little sister. Before all of this. How maybe if I knew more about her, I would have a better clue on what to do, or why her, or just any leg to stand on and make sense of it. These visitations turned more into a penance rather than a last ditch effort to get her back.

She would take to her room and I would take to mine and that’s the beginning and end. I have no clue how she spent her time in that room. I don’t have the faintest idea how her schooling went, whether she enjoyed her college days. Hopes for the future. I thought we were both used to the distance.

I can’t shake this feeling I need to do something. The cold on the back of my neck makes me all antsy — that if I don’t take the next step, it’ll get me next. But would it be so bad?

The drive down from the cliff is all turvy and a little scenic if you’re in the mood for it. Sprouts and foliage and, of course, if you aren’t careful, some unstable turns you best go ten speed under. I’ve gotten used to the road and I know where all the bumps are now, all of the faded signs and vines.

I’m not sure if it would be so bad. Back then I was convinced we were all going somewhere. Excitement in the air, between my friends and their links and giggling and wireless mics and, well, we’re going to have robots, we’re going immortal, and how many more places waiting! Such palpable visions and we all could see it, so I bade my time through the endless ocean of media concocted and served. Did it all, and read all that I could read, watched, went to and bought.

But I guess I’ve been funny for a few years now. All I can manage is eating and staring at the cars beyond the window outside my cubicle. Most days are silent.

I pull up to our driveway. It’s a twenty minute ride with our three lane highway. And it looks like I’m the only one home; parents are abroad again to forget the pain.

We walled off her room ever since the day. And I want to respect that, though I also wonder if I’ll learn something by looking around. She always left her door a good chunk ajar, and in retrospect I guess she was waiting for anyone to visit, though she’d never out loud say it.

After fiddling with the garage and tossing my keys at the first table, I make way toward the stairs.