sixteen. deskny

As the squeals of the film club plummeted to the planet’s surface, I spotted the girl with the bruised eye pushing herself out of the club room. I sprinted after her, watching her climb the nearby staircase to the third floor.

I elbowed my way through the other students, who ruptured out of the club room like newborn spiders scurrying in all directions. When I reached the staircase, I saw the girl running past the fourth floor. I gave chase. Her footsteps mimicked my own, moving stepwise in spirals up until we burst onto the roof of the Bergerac.

The eye of black mold hovered directly above us.

“Stop!” I yelled after her.

No guardrails surrounded the roof. A short wall lay on the perimeter and barely rose to one’s kneecaps. The girl with the bruised eye stepped onto this wall. Her shoulders and feet leaned back, but her head looked straight down. I wondered what she saw down there.

“In a different world,” murmured the girl with the bruised eye, “Sometimes I dream that I’m really from a completely different world. In that world, I take a leap of faith, and I’m embraced with great joy. I know no more despair, because I’ve reached the end of the sky.”

“It’s over,” I said. “Valerie. The film club. The Electromagnetic Man. Everything.”

“I know,” she smiled. “I’ve waited for this for a long time.”

“We can go now,” I said.

“No,” the girl with the bruised eye shook her head. “You can go. ‘The world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy.’ Do you remember? It was a quote Professor Medea wrote down in class.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Only one of us can go on, because we live in different worlds,” said the girl with the bruised eye. “The one who lives in the world of the unhappy has to stay here. In the end, she passes the trial of deskny for everyone, and the world is thus saved.”

“But we’ve already saved–” I tried to inch closer.

“No!” the girl cried. “You don’t understand. At least you had the Electromagnetic Man. He saved you, didn’t he? He was the one who saved the world in July, 1999. Your World. But where was he to save mine? Why couldn’t I have an Electromagnetic Man? Then, maybe my unhappy World could have been saved too.”

The distance between me and the girl with the bruised eye narrowed to the span of three, maybe four, jumps. If we considered the world beyond the spatial, however, the true distance between us could be measured by the gap in understanding that produced a giant molded black eye that I could see and she could not.

If I was like my brother, I could reach her, but I possessed neither his reach nor speed nor his mastery over the waves. All our lives, my brother and I had only ever shared one talent, a talent which I used, which I still use, to give birth to the artifact known to me as my World.

“...Maybe it still can be saved.” I proposed.

“What do you mean?”

“Who says that you have to stay forever in the unhappy world?” I shrugged. “Who says that you have to be there alone? Why can’t you join my World instead?”

“Now you’re the one making things up,” she laughed. “That’s not possible. You know it. Just leave me here, please.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Not when you don’t know where you’re flying off to. You can’t see what’s out there, can you? Up in the sky. There’s a giant eye, formed from congealed black mold that’s been growing on campus for years.”

The girl with the bruised eye looked upwards. She looked back at me then back up again.

“Where?” she asked. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s right above us,” I answered. “It’s the face of deskny that traps us in our own local, atomized experience. Even if you pass the test, the rest of us can’t follow you, because we can’t escape its gaze. I can’t escape its gaze.”

“Does that mean I can’t save anyone?” the girl with the bruised eye began to sob. “Why are you telling me this now? This trial is supposed to make meaning out of suffering. If I don’t sacrifice and save everyone, then what was the point of my life?”

“The point is we can save ourselves,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder. Does this black mold really exist? I don’t know. I see it everywhere I go, but you can’t see it, so the mold lives in a simultaneous abode of complete and incomplete understanding. Does the trial of deskny exist? Who’s to say it does or does not? What are the true sounds of electromagnetic waves? I don’t know. I know it as the sound of my brother’s voice, but you must hear something else. What, I wonder? Dampened electrical noise? Babble? The chorus of angels? I don’t know.”

I shuffled my feet closer to the girl with the bruised eye, whose tears streamed out of her face and blurred her eyes to my approach.

“What I do know,” I continued, “is that deskny is a part of us. So it’s true that all humans must undergo a trial to face deskny and overcome it and see what world lies beyond it. But I think this trial has another hidden meaning.”

“What hidden meaning?” the girl croaked.

“That deskny can only be defeated when you share your World with someone else,” I said. “And how difficult is that? The more I think about it, the more I think it may be the most difficult thing of all. How could we share ourselves like that? How ugly is your World? How ugly is mine? I’m sure even Valerie’s World isn’t as glamorous as her clothes and jewelry. But that’s all part of deskny’s plan, to make us think there’s nothing we can do about it. But it’s not true! I can show you!”

I was close enough, finally.

I threw my hands forward and yanked on the girl’s wrists. She yelped. The girl with the bruised eye tried prying my fingers off, but my grip was locked like a knuckle coupler. She tried shuffling back with her feet, but gravity was on my side. I simply leaned back, relying on the tug of 9.8 meters per second to drag her with me down from the short walls of the Bergerac.

Our foreheads collided. I felt a sharp throb as our electromagnetic waves fused together. With that newfound polarity, we ricocheted off the Earth’s magnetic field, and the girl with the bruised eye and I found ourselves launched into the center of the sky.

“What’s happening!” she screeched and squeezed her eyelids shut. “Are we falling?”

“Don’t look away!” I shouted. “This is it! Look! It’s right there. Can you see it?”

The girl with the bruised eye blinked her eyes open and gasped. Her gaze glazed over the giant eye fashioned out of black mold. The fungal growth blinked as well, then tilted to the side, surprised that anything but the deep recesses of my mind could ever perceive it.

“I see it!” the girl shouted with delight. “I see it, Rosalyne! Oh my goodness, it’s huge!”

“There’s no time!” I yelled. “Now! Tell deskny what you want it to hear!”

Natasha Yu collected herself and nodded. She drew in a deep, almost agonizing breath. There, amidst the howls of banshees, Natasha shouted for the very first time into my ears.

“I don’t want to sacrifice myself,” she hollered. “I want Valerie to leave me alone! I want them to stop hurting me. I don’t want to watch Apocalypse Anew again. I want to go to class and study and be with people who care about me. I want to care about other people too. If my World can be as lovely as Rosalyne says, even ugly, painful days I can manage.”

And then, with one final exhale.

“I just want to try living happily everyday!”

The black mold mass shuddered at those words. Its white pupil turned stricken. The filamentous strands serving as its eyebrows melted. All over, bubbles surfaced on its oozing skin. They popped and sprayed out spores only to be evaporated in the face of a rising sun.

For the two of us had floated above the clouds. The Bergerac and the library with its macabre golden sheets were but dots to us now.

The black mold had followed us here, chased us to stop us from reaching this place.

And at the sky’s end, where the sun shined the brightest, the illusory World that once trapped us burned away beneath that solar magnificence, and all the stars and what they represented with their combined, infinitesimal brilliance incinerated the black mold that had festered within the Bergerac, within all the school, within her, within me, and within you.

Natasha and I fell back to the Earth.

Below, the rooftop of the Bergerac widened its jaws as if to consume us.

We were not scared.

We had seen the World beyond deskny.

Any darkness that came next could only ever be temporary.