III.

I felt exhausted when I entered my apartment that night. The golden screens. The girl with the black eye. Mr. Caraway. Too much sensory overload plagued the day. I needed something to decompress.

Fortunately, on Friday around this very time, I indulged in a guilty pleasure of mine.

First, however, my apartment.

It was cramped. Very much so.

My parents were indeed wealthy beyond compare, but not only had I asked for a small, unassuming living space of my own accord, the sheer volume of things I littered around would have been excessive even for my room back home.

In a way, this made sense. I was living for two people. I had taken my brother’s belongings with me when I moved out of my parents’ place, then supplemented both of our lives with new things as if we had both gone on to the same university.

The only compromise I made in this regard was with the bed and desk. I decided it would be excessive to have a second bed and workspace that remained unoccupied, and so I stuffed my brother’s belongings along with my own.

Everywhere else, I had drilled bookshelves into practically every open wallspace there was. Slight crevices the width of my forearm were allowed when there was a switch or electrical outlet in the way. With the shelves installed, the hallway into my studio required that I shifted side by side to squeeze in and out.

As for the contents of the shelves themselves, books were perhaps the least common tenant. There were at least three full sections, don’t get me wrong, but my brother had not devoted himself only to reading before he died, and much that he did read were the rare books that belonged to our parents’ private study.

In lieu of books there were, for instance, rows stocked with Japanese action figurines, featuring superheroes and monsters, with the monsters like this great electric eel towering over the heroes with its jaws clenched over their necks. Then there was my brother’s botany collection, which lay withered in pots of eroded dirt and stubby leafless trunks, because he hadn’t watered them since his death.

Then there was my desk which overflowed with his writings. He used to journal a lot. I never read them, but I had arranged his affairs and set his radio over the loose pages so that they would not blow away when I opened the window every once in a while to prevent black mold.

Finally, there was my bed. Most of my brother’s effects in this regard were stored in the closet, because I didn’t want too many things crowding the mattress. His blankets stank of melted solder anyway, and regardless, it was summer so I definitely didn’t need them.

The one thing that did belong to my brother was a stuffed teddy bear that I had laid to rest by my pillow. It was a sturdy little guy; my brother had spent weeks pouring over catalogs researching the brand with the best quality fur and build. As such, the bear had little in the way of wear and tear, just a few singed bits around the feet and a narrow ring around the neck where the fur had been sheared by tension.

After setting my bag on the bed, I undressed and walked straight into the shower. I always rinsed myself with cold water. It cleansed me, doused me of the impurities left by the sun after it had spent the day setting my skin on fire.

When I finished, I spent several more minutes in the tub. I scrubbed the straight porcelain edges with my brother's old toothbrush in order to dissuade the growth of black mold. I then dried myself and draped my hair in a cotton towel. I did not use a blow dryer.

Back in my studio, I shut off all the other lights, locked my windows tight, and booted up my computer. Digital blue washed over me. The computer was several years old, and the cheap fans I had purchased were starting to rattle. The processing unit let out a sharp squeal. The graphics card used to make a similar gyrating whine when it started to sag from within the tower, but after I had propped it up with an empty aluminum canister, it had stopped causing me trouble.

Another electronic murmur grazed my ears, this time from behind me. I ignored it. I didn’t have time. It was about to begin. Besides, I knew from the vibrations that it was Mr. Caraway. He was apologizing for his behavior and asking for the time of our next appointment.

My desktop was glued to the same view from the last time I logged in. Aside from a few recording applications, a browser window sat front and center on the screen.

I had become enamored with a trend that had arisen in recent years, where people recorded themselves in an avatar inspired by Japanese anime and simply talked to people. They were like idols, and a few of them could even sing.

My idol, Destiny, didn’t have such talent. She instead spent her airtime speaking about her everyday life and its challenges, which made me feel closer to her.

I was certain that this was in fact, part of the ploy, that Destiny’s everyday life was sheer fabrication, a fantasy nestled behind the safety of electric wires and terabytes of misinformation. But I was drawn nonetheless to Destiny, perhaps for those very reasons, because unlike the so-called “real world,” Destiny’s face, digitally curated by an artist I had never heard of, was palpable to me.

At the click of a button, she appeared. A chatbox adjacent to the streaming window came alive. Destiny had pink hair, dark violet downturned eyes, a pointy chin, and a trilogy of straight lines that flipped across a two dimensional plane depending on the disposition of the human being piloting her. I flipped open my own camera, because Destiny often stared straight into the screen, and I liked to entertain the possibility that somewhere, maybe in a rural cottage in Inaka that hummed with enough electricity to transmit packets, Destiny could see me.

And I saw in Destiny the last remaining face on Earth.

“Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, this is Destiny. How are you today?”

Very good, very good, Destiny.

“Everyone seems to be having a good time. I’ve had a very eventful day myself. It’s quite hot this summer, isn’t it? As expected in a month like July. Actually, have I told any of you before? My birthday’s in July.”

Really, Destiny? You’ve never told me before.

“July 1999. That’s the year I was born,” Destiny recalled. “That was the same year the French astrologer Nostradamus predicted the world was going to end. The world didn’t end that month, and I was born prematurely, so my parents said that my birth saved the world. That was destiny, they said. I know that sounds silly to people, you don’t have to lie to me in chat, but I’ve always taken my name very seriously as a child.”

“Unfortunately, this July,” she continued, “The arrangement of the summer triangle tells me something is going to happen. I don’t know how I can feel it, but it’s just… the things that have been happening lately. I’ve been helping someone recently with an investigation. The things that I’ve seen… I’m sorry! I know this is supposed to be a fun time for all of us.”

It’s okay, Destiny. It’s always a fun time when you’re with me.

“But, now that we’re on the topic, I think scary times can be fun too. Maybe, some of us have a duty to make terror fun, for people to feel less scared,” Destiny chuckled. “I’m no good with horror manga, but the ones I can read are really fun! They can be… exciting don’t you think? Because you never know who's who and what’s going to happen next.”

I’ve never read any manga before.

“Anyway,” she said. “I think on that note, maybe I’ll do some tarot readings tonight? How does that sound, everyone? I’m seeing a lot of excitement in the chat. It looks like it’ll be an apocalyptic evening!”

Destiny’s voice drifted away, even as my quivering eyes remained fastened to her blurry pink visage. After a while, I could hardly hear her, could hardly hear myself save for my own breath, which sounded more and more like a kind of snore, punctured martelé strokes that ravaged my throat with death knells sharp enough to conjure the taste of copper.

And it was in that twilight between life and death, where the air in my throat felt thin and light and ragged from all that speaking, that I became aware of all the other sounds of the world.

The heartbeat beneath my breath. The empty static of my headphones. The sound of heat, incandescent ultramarine pressed into my stricken eyeballs. The flooding of my vacant gut, my stomach juices seeping like the overflowing Nile to the rest of my body. The screeching of Bloody Mary whose face I had long hidden by dirty half sewn rags. The electromagnetic waves sourced from the unplugged radio, flowing into me like the voices of dead spirits from a seance, telling me about the black mold, the black mold that transmigrated from the hallways of the Bergerac Building, the black mold that now gurgled and crawled and writhed with their intestinal limbs in the humid shadows behind the shelves.

And by the time the sounds finally stopped the morning bird had chirped and the sun had risen and somewhere someone had been born, collapsing the quantum superposition of the universe onto the waves of an infant’s screams, and then human beings entered my purview from beyond the window and the fleeting night which had sung a song for the unraveling of the world had once again suffered a complete and utter defeat.