Fragment 5: Well, That's exhausting (3)

That was how many times Adi's alarm rang before he finally opened his eyes.

"I'M LATE!"

He shot upright, hand flying toward his phone, ready to accuse it of failing him at the most important moment of his life. Then he saw the time.

Sunday. Seven in the morning.

He had set every alarm three hours ahead.

For a moment, he considered going back to sleep. The moment lasted until he remembered what happened whenever he closed his eyes. Lately, sleep wasn't a rest. It was an aggressive subscription service he didn't know how to cancel.

He dragged himself out of bed and got dressed: shirt, suit, polished shoes. He even combed his hair, a remarkable achievement for a man whose usual routine consisted of locating his glasses and negotiating with gravity.

His mother looked him up and down at the dining table.

"Why are you wearing a suit? It's Sunday."

"Anime award ceremony."

"You're receiving an award?"

"Let's not get ambitious before breakfast."

Anipox Studios had submitted its latest project, and his boss had spent the entire week behaving as if victory were legally guaranteed. Adi had spent the entire project trying to remain conscious. Still, if the studio won, maybe his boss would finally admit that junior animators were people, not decorative equipment that ran on coffee and deadlines.

He was almost out the door when his father's voice stopped him.

"Adi."

He turned. His father didn't look up from his newspaper.

"Don't fall asleep on stage."

"I'm not going on stage."

"Good."

Adi hesitated. "Dad... have you forgiven me?"

"Never."

"Then why are you giving advice?"

"I'm not. I'm making a compromise with my life."

The newspaper turned a page. Adi stood there a second longer than he meant to, then left.

* * *

The auditorium was all bright lights, expensive suits, and people who had clearly never had to choose between lunch and bus fare.

Adi sat with his colleagues near the front. His boss kept adjusting his tie and checking the stage.

"Today's the day," he whispered. "I can feel it."

"He said that last year," his colleague murmured.

"Last year he had confidence," Adi said. "This year he has confidence and a better tie."

Awards came and went. Cameras flashed. Winners climbed the stage. A small red light glowed on the main camera: the whole ceremony was being livestreamed. Adi watched with a growing sense of professional inadequacy.

Then came their category.

His boss sat up straight. Adi folded his hands. The presenter opened the envelope.

"And the award goes to... Red Panda Studios!"

Applause. Nobody at Anipox moved.

Their boss slowly lowered his hands. "...Interesting."

"Sir," a colleague whispered, "we lost."

"I heard, thank you."

Adi nodded. "Well, at least the red pandas won."

"Not one more word."

Adi closed his mouth. He lasted forty seconds.

The lights were warm. The seats were soft. The presenter began praising the winning team's innovative rendering pipeline and visual storytelling, and somewhere between those two phrases, Adi's brain quietly submitted its resignation.

His body, however, did not get the memo.

In his head, he was at his desk at Anipox, at three in the morning, which was reassuringly normal. The auditorium had melted into the studio floor. And across the aisle sat a man in a very expensive suit and very shiny glasses, who had no business being in the office.

Adi looked at the glasses. A thought arrived. It was a terrible thought. Unfortunately, terrible thoughts had recently become the only thoughts he could execute without difficulty.

It was a dream, after all. In dreams, you steal glasses.

He reached over, lifted them off the CEO of Red Panda Studios, put them on, and stood.

The CEO did not react. His brain was still buffering.

"Sir," Adi's colleague whispered. "Adi's walking toward the stage."

The boss didn't look away from the trophy. "Why would he do that?"

"He's wearing someone's glasses."

"...Upside down?"

"I think so."

"Stop him."

"How?"

"You're a person with legs!"

By the time the legs decided, Adi was already at the microphone.

He smiled the smile of a man who had no idea what he was doing, because as far as he knew, he wasn't doing anything.

"Hello. I'm Adi. Junior animator, Anipox Studios. Junior is important. Please remember that part."

He leaned closer to the microphone.

"Also, none of you are real, so I'm going to be honest. I haven't slept since a Tuesday. I don't know which Tuesday. Time is a flat circle, and also a render queue."

A few people laughed. Others looked at their neighbors to check whether they were supposed to.

"When I was a kid, I thought animation was drawing imaginary people with imaginary problems. Wrong. Their problems are my problems. I've animated a man falling off a cliff so many times at four in the morning that I started to feel it. Last week I woke up and apologized to gravity."

More laughter. In the dream, his coworkers were laughing too. He felt briefly, absurdly loved.

"I don't have a work-life balance. I have a work-life hostage situation, and the hostage has started taking the captor's side."

In the front row, Adi's boss had stopped moving. His colleague leaned in. "Sir. He's off script."

"There is no script."

"Then he's doing great."

"That's the problem."

Onstage, Adi turned and pointed at the giant Red Panda Studios banner behind him, with the delight of a man spotting an old enemy at a buffet.

"Red Panda Studios! Congratulations! Let's talk about your logo. It looks like a ginger sock that lost a fight with a hairdryer. Whoever designed it was either blind or paid by the hour. Probably both."

The room roared.

"I watched your winning film last night. Not by choice. I fell asleep on the sofa and it was on. And I still woke up angry."

Louder.

"Your hero has the face of a boiled potato that just got bad news. Your villain walks like he's late for a bus he doesn't want to catch. And the talking cat? Three hundred people worked on that cat, and it's still the smartest one in the film. That's not a compliment to the cat."

Somewhere in the third row, a woman from Red Panda Studios was wheezing into her program. Two seats down, a man was pretending to cough and failing.

"You know what your mascot looks like? Like it's apologizing for your movies. Look at that face. 'Sorry. I tried to stop them.'"

He wiped his eye, then pressed on.

"And you won. Who did you beat? Us? We animated our film in the dark, with our elbows, on four hours of sleep a week, half of us crying into the keyboard. You didn't win an award. You beat a hospital ward. Your trophy should come with a sticker: Defeated the exhausted."

He tapped the stolen frames.

"And your CEO. Sir. The glasses are gorgeous. Everything behind them is a crime scene. You look like a man who sells insurance to ghosts. You look like what happens when a suit has a midlife crisis and gets a Wi-Fi password. You have the energy of a locked toilet at a railway station. I put on your glasses to see the world the way you do, and it's upside down and overpriced. Honestly? Accurate. I'm keeping them. Consider it compensation for your film."

The boss slowly put his head in his hands. His colleague patted his shoulder.

"Smile," the colleague whispered. "The cameras."

"I am smiling."

"That's your crying face."

"And thank you to my colleagues," Adi said warmly. "Without you, I would have suffered alone, which is fine, I'm excellent at it. But no. You kept saying 'just one more frame.' There is no such thing as one more frame. Frames are potato chips. Nobody has ever had one."

He sniffed. Wiped one eye with the back of his wrist.

"And to whoever ate my sandwich from the studio fridge on the fourteenth: I forgive you. My father hasn't forgiven me for something, and I've never found out what, so I'm trying to be the bigger man. It's working. I'm so big. I'm enormous. I need to lie down."

He set the microphone down gently.

"Thank you for listening to my resignation."

The applause was enormous.

Adi's eyes were already closed. His head dipped. For one long second he stood perfectly still onstage, wearing a stranger's glasses, looking less like an award-winning speaker and more like a mannequin whose batteries had died.

Then the applause hit him like a wall.

He woke with a violent jolt.

Eight hundred people were on their feet. Phones were raised. The red light on the main camera glowed steadily at his face.

"...Huh?"

He looked at the microphone. The glasses. The audience.

Then he looked at the front row.

His boss was standing. He wasn't furious. He was smiling. Every tooth. He pointed at the camera, then at Adi, then gave a slow, trembling thumbs-up, like a man giving a thumbs-up at gunpoint. His lips moved, very carefully: Come. Here.

Beside him, a colleague was mouthing something else. Adi couldn't read it. It looked like RUN.

Adi had worked for that man for four years. He had seen him angry, desperate, and once, crying over a render farm. He had never seen him smile like that.

It was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.

He looked at the audience, at the cameras, at the CEO in the third row, who was now very much unbuffered and rising from his seat with a face like thunder in a suit.

Adi leaned toward the microphone.

"...Thank you."

He placed the glasses on the lectern, stepped backward, and walked off the opposite side of the stage with the brisk, confident stride of a man who had never been there.

He took the staff corridor. He took the fire exit. He took the first taxi.

"Where to?" the driver asked.

Adi dug a black business card out of his wallet.

He had kept it for days. He still wasn't sure why. Maybe some small part of him had known that a ridiculous man in expensive sunglasses would become relevant again.

Or maybe he'd forgotten to throw it away.

"The railway station," he said. "Quickly."

* * *

The train rattled through the afternoon. Adi's phone buzzed against his leg.

Boss: 14 missed calls.

Then a message.

Boss: Wonderful speech, Adi. Truly. Come to the office early tomorrow. We have a lot to discuss.

Adi read it three times. There was no insult. No threat. Not even one capital letter.

"That," he said, to nobody, "is the scariest sentence I've ever read."

Another buzz. This time, his father.

Dad: Your mother is showing the video to the neighbors.

Adi stared at the screen. A second message arrived.

Dad: You were asleep, weren't you?

He typed slowly. You've forgiven me?

The reply took a full minute.

Dad: Never.

Then, a few seconds later:

Dad: Eat something.

Adi smiled at the screen, a little tiredly. Then he put the phone face down, leaned his head against the window, and did not sleep, because the train was too loud, and for once, he was almost grateful.

* * *

The mansion was not a large house. It was not a rich man's house. It was the kind of building that made ordinary people check whether their clothes were clean before leaving a taxi.

Adi approached the gate.

"Hello? Anyone alive? Ghosts? Staff? Someone with a pulse and hospitality?"

"Leave," said a guard.

"I haven't introduced myself."

"You don't need to."

They escorted him away. He came back. They escorted him away again. The third time, he found a microphone by the gate and picked it up.

"OYE! AYUS WITHOUT THE H! IT'S ADI! YOUR LOCAL WELL-WISHER!"

Inside, Ayus, who had been sitting on the floor of his living room staring at a glass of water, closed his eyes.

"Oh no. He actually came."

A few minutes later, Adi was inside, turning in a slow circle in the middle of an enormous hall.

"Damn. I thought you were bluffing."

Ayus did not look up. His robe was crooked. He hadn't shaved. He looked like a man who had been awake for a week, which, Adi thought, made at least one of them an expert.

"I'm not," Ayus said. "I'm not bluffing. I'm not... it's all real, it's all too real, I can't..."

"Breathe."

"I don't want to breathe! I want to stop!"

Adi picked up an apple from a silver bowl and took a bite.

"Do you know how much that costs?" Ayus whispered.

"It's an apple."

"Twenty dollars. It's imported."

Adi stopped chewing. He lowered the apple very slowly onto the table.

"...I apologize to the apple."

"I asked the well for money," Ayus said. "A lot. And it gave me a room full. I was so happy. I bought a house. Cars. Clothes. Guards. And every time I spent money, twice as much came back. I thought I was blessed. I thought God liked me."

"Sounds reasonable."

"Then I tried to give it away. It came back doubled. I tried to burn some. It came back doubled. I bought another house, a bigger one, and it came back, and I bought another..."

"You bought a third house to fix the problem of having too many houses?"

"It made sense at the time!"

"It really didn't."

Ayus stood up, shaking, and walked down a corridor. He opened a heavy door.

Adi stepped inside, and stopped.

Cash. Banknotes covered the floor, climbed the walls in neat towers, and spilled from boxes into narrow, winding paths. It filled the room like water.

For several seconds, Adi said nothing.

"You could build a country with this."

"Please don't give me ideas."

"Can't you deposit it?"

"With what explanation?" Ayus's voice cracked. "'A well gave it to me'? They'll think I'm a counterfeiter. Or worse. I read about it. I can't stop reading about it. They freeze everything. They take everything. And I... I count it, you know. I count it at night. Because I can't sleep. I lie there and listen to it."

"Listen to it?"

"It grows, Adi. I swear I can hear it."

Adi looked at the towers of cash. He imagined the same room tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. More money. Less space. More fear. No exit.

He didn't make a joke.

"So what do you do now?"

"Nothing. I sit here. I think about my decisions."

"Sounds productive."

"Would you like to try it?"

"I can't." Adi dropped onto a crate and rubbed his eyes. "I have the opposite problem."

Ayus finally looked at him.

"I can't stay awake. At work, in conversations, in the middle of important events." He paused. "I took two naps while you were explaining your financial collapse."

"You were snoring."

"I was expressing disagreement unconsciously."

Ayus stared at him for a long moment. Somewhere in the stacks, a bundle of notes slid off a pile with a soft whisper.

One man had too much money to spend. The other couldn't stay awake long enough to spend his life.

"We're both victims of a suspiciously literal well," Adi said.

"Speak for yourself."

"Fine. I'm the victim. You're an idiot."

"You came to my house."

"I came to see if you had a solution."

"I thought you came to ask for money."

Adi looked offended. "Why would I ask for money? You can't spend it."

Ayus opened his mouth. Closed it. "...I hate that you have a point."

Adi stood and brushed dust from his trousers.

"We go back to the well. We ask it to undo it."

"Will it work?"

"No."

"Then why..."

"Because the alternative is sitting here while you listen to your money."

Ayus thought about it. Then, shakily, he reached for his car keys.

"I hate you."

"Get in line."

* * *

Ayus drove. Adi sat in the passenger seat, fighting gravity.

"Stay awake."

"I am awake."

"Your eyes are closed."

"I'm saving battery."

"Eyes don't have batteries."

"Neither does your personality. Yet here we are."

Ayus gripped the wheel until his knuckles went pale and said nothing for twenty minutes.

By the time they reached the grove, the sun was sinking. They hurried through the trees, following the path Adi remembered, and reached the banyan tree.

And stopped.

The old stone well was gone.

In its place stood a small shrine. The opening had been sealed with concrete, and a Buddha statue sat on top. Fresh flowers rested at the base. Someone had swept the stones clean.

"...No," Adi said.

"Where is it?" Ayus's voice rose. "Where's the well?"

An elderly priest approached with a small broom.

"Looking for the old well? We sealed it. People kept throwing coins in. Very dangerous. Someone could fall."

Ayus made a sound that wasn't quite a word.

"You filled it with concrete," Adi said.

"Yes."

"And put a statue on top."

"Yes."

"And nobody thought to leave a phone number?"

The priest frowned. "For the well?"

Adi closed his eyes. "...Forget it."

The priest went back to sweeping, satisfied that the matter had been resolved.

Ayus sank slowly to the ground. For a minute, neither man spoke. Adi had come all this way. He had survived the ceremony, the escape, the train, the guards, the mansion, the apple. For the first time in days, he had genuinely believed there might be a way back to normal.

Now the only thing that could help them was buried under concrete.

"Now what?" Ayus whispered.

"Who knows?"

Silence.

Adi's phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen. Boss: 31 missed calls. Below it, a notification: Anipox Junior Animator's Speech: 2.4M views.

He turned the phone face down on the stone and left it there.

Ayus stared at the dirt. "I hate this country."

"I hate being awake."

"You're awake right now."

"Don't remind me."

Adi sat beside him. His shoulders loosened. His eyes began to close.

"Don't you dare fall asleep."

"I'm not falling asleep."

"Your head is moving."

"I'm thinking."

"With your eyes closed?"

"It's a private process."

Adi's head dropped onto Ayus's shoulder.

Ayus looked at him for a long time. Then, very quietly, he stopped arguing.

The priest glanced at them, shook his head, and kept sweeping. The sun slid behind the trees. The shrine stayed silent.

And somewhere beneath three feet of concrete, the well had absolutely no intention of helping anyone...