August 13th - "Opus, Part 1"

THE LAND OF NOD

BY LUCILLE BROWN

Tucked away in a certain corner of a certain state within a certain country is the suburb of Nod, a sleepy town of clanging industrial lots and dusty interstates. Nod is most noticeable for its early history with the Pilgrims, a gruesome series of murders in the 1980s, and none other than the smartest member of the local 11th grade intelligentsia - JESS BLUE, sharp in intellect and sharp in tongue. With her gracious looks (that flowing brown hair, the way she rocks that blue sweatshirt) and her gracious athleticism (4th place in the 3rd grade 50 meter dash) - Jess was destined for greatness, perhaps a Nobel Prize, perhaps at least one term at the American presidency (can’t set expectations too high).

But right now, she was stuck in high school with a bunch of morons.

One of said morons sat behind her. It was LUIGINA, and don’t let her academic success fool you - she was king of the morons, and Jess wouldn't want it any other way. Unfortunately, she was at her friend's mercy once again.

“...hey,” Jess began, turning around to lean on Luigina’s desk. “Any chance I could borrow your math homework?”

Luigina phased in and out of sleep, strawberry blonde hair flowing down her face like rivers on mountainsides. “You said you were gonna start doing it yourself.”

“I’m a busy girl,” Jess complained. “Enjoying life and all, you know? Yesterday I walked around a part of Nod I’ve never been before. Right alongside the highway. Cars came right by me and I could feel the wind ripple right through me.”

Luigina yawned and wiped her eyes as she awoke from her slumber. “You find that enjoyable?”

“It’s life,” Jess answered with a cheeky grin. “Any part of life is utterly fascinating to me.”

“What about doing homework?”

Jess frowned. “Touche.” The future writer of a 18-book New York Times bestseller swashbuckling-steampunk-clockpunk-fantasy-drama-comedy-romance-slice of life-political thriller-bildungsroman clapped her hands in complete submission to the king of the morons. “Please?”

The clock on the wall ticked. A nearby group of neanderthals drew cave paintings in their notebooks depicting the voluptuous girls in the class. A laborer cut the lawn outside the school. Jess started to sweat.

The answer was, of course, the expected, everyday answer.

“Sure,” Luigina said.

“You know it,” Luigina answered, reaching into her backpack.

Luigina gave a lazy smile. “Sure.”

None of these worked. Sitting on her computer, Lucille frowned as she backspaced out of yet another sentence. She leaned back in her chair, ignoring the pain welling up in her ass that came from sitting for nine hours straight - ‘cuz she was gonna write, and she was gonna write well.

Jess and Luigina were natural choices for her new story. They were old characters, her first characters, created by Lucille at the end of high school after watching twenty or so slice of life anime in a single month. It had been years, but writing a character is like riding a bike - you can always go back and pick up where you left off, just like that.

Well, Lucille didn’t know how to ride a bike, but she assumed it was something like that. Jess was the easiest to write since she was just an amalgamation of every hyperactive dumbass to be found in a slice of life series. Her ruminations on enjoying life were Lucille’s own words back in high school, back when the average day was full of bright lights and endless tomorrows. 

But let’s be clear - Jess was absolutely NOT a self-insert. You see, she was egotistical, while Lucille was the farthest thing from it. And besides, in Lucille’s head, Jess had one of those high-pitched anime voices, while Lucille’s own voice had more of a Clark Gable quality to it.

And yet, despite bike riding and all that, Lucille just couldn’t find the groove. The high school classroom situations just weren’t relatable anymore. The high school idealism had drifted away during these past few years of college and history. Sure, you can always go back to riding a bike, but what if your old bike had gotten rusty? You have to replace it wholesale and buy a new one, right? Or you replace all the rusted parts - but is it even the same bike at that point?

Lucille tried to replace all the rusted parts in a short story she wrote last week. Jess was aged up from eighteen to twenty-two, and Lucille started writing about the experiences of a twenty-two-year-old in the modern era, and then…

Jess was DEFINITELY not a self-insert. But, hypothetically, if she was…and you replace the parts that no longer apply, scrub away the love of life, crank up the narcissism, make her reflect the tribulations of 2023 rather than the youthful idealism of the 2010s, back when we had reached the last man and history was official over…if your self-insert (but she isn’t) has become a cynical douchebag, what does that say about the person at the keyboard behind it all?

Lucille rubbed her eyes and glanced out the window. Dawn would be rising soon - better get to bed. She reluctantly slipped out of her chair, unsatisfied with the day’s writing, and stretched, feeling a satisfying crack in her back, at least, as she gazed at her childhood bedroom.

Her high school version stood there before her.

A gasp escaped Lucille. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head, yet her high school self remained standing there. Lucille squinted her eyes and stepped forward, but so did her younger doppelganger. Lucille expected the spacetime continuum to explode when they made contact, but instead, they phased right through each other. When Lucille glanced back, her high school version sat at her desk, opened up a word doc, and started writing.

“Oh, I get it,” Lucille supposed. “I’ve lived in the same room for twenty-two years now. I must’ve walked up to my computer and started writing a thousand times. I’m just remembering it out loud.” Content with her logic, Lucille was about to leave the hallucination behind and go to bed when the keyboard stopped clacking. High School Lucille spun around in her chair and stood.

The two Lucilles faced each other. In a moment of utter silence, the reality of the situation dawned on them.

“God, I’m hot,” they said in unison. Then their eyes widened.

“I’m not just remembering,” present-day Lucille realized. “I must be dreaming, too. Lucid dreaming? I must’ve fallen asleep at my desk. The power of CVS melatonin.”

Young Lucille frowned. “What happened to living naturally and just enjoying life? I start doing drugs when I get older?”

Older Lucille frowned. “You stupid hippie. If you don’t want to do all kinds of drugs, then you should've found more satisfaction in that everyday life!”

The two Lucilles glared at each other. Then the frowns slowly transformed into smiles.

“God, I’m the best,” they said in unison.

Older Lucille rubbed her chin and gasped once again. “Oh, I get it even more now. This isn’t just a memory or a dream or a lucid dream - it’s a vision quest! I’ve always wanted to go on one. This is a turbulent time in my life, so my spirit or whatever is sending me a vision quest to help me come up with the answers!”

She patted her younger version on the shoulder. “Sick, we can touch each other now.” But then she spotted the devious look on her doppelganger’s face. “Not…not in a weird way. I’m not wasting a vision quest on sexual experimentation, even if it’s with myself. We got bigger fish to fry. But both of us being called Lucille is confusing. You’re High School Lucille…so HSL it is.”

HSL patted her older version on the shoulder. She was just a couple inches shorter, but perhaps twenty pounds lighter. She wore the iconic blue sweatshirt Lucille always donned in high school, before the wear and tear and a couple of vomit sessions in college made her toss it away. HSL had a neat haircut, the brown hair going down to the back of her neck, while Lucille’s hair had grown wild again, spilling down to her shoulders.

HSL raised a hand. “Any part of life is fascinating. Want to make life fascinating again?”

“You bet.” The two women clasped hands, and wind suddenly whipped at Lucille’s face.

“Her childhood bedroom and her childhood house and even her childhood hometown suddenly gave way - night had turned to day, the summer sun shone brightly, and now they stood atop a floating island of grass fields and dandelions and petunias and other flowers she didn’t know the name to but knew that one day she would. Asteroids and meteors and clouds floated and arched slowly across the sky, rainbows touched the tops of distant crystal towers, and a kaleidoscope city stretched across the valley below,” Lucille said, her narration matching the very scene in front of her. She turned to HSL. “Hey, I wrote this scene in a fantasy one-shot the other day.”

“This vision quest is about your relationship to writing and life itself,” HSL explained with all the wisdom of the deep subconscious. “Perhaps they’re one and the same.”

“Schweet.” Lucille gazed up at the sky and recalled her writing. “Due to gravitational fluctuations and the geomagnetic poles, the planetoids are gathering at this very spot.”

HSL gestured toward the open sky, off the edge of the floating island. “Quick, we must hurry.”

The closest asteroid sparkled, the gems inside emitting light through cracks in the rock. “Huh, I never actually finished the one-shot,” Lucille realized. “So how are we supposed to escape this?”

HSL pointed at her chest. “The idea is deep down in here. Your subconscious holds all the ideas, the conscious mind turns them into language, the writing hand turns them into literature.”

Lucille crossed her arms. “Alright, High School Me, don’t get too big for your britches. I went to college, you know.”

A smile crept across her doppelganger’s head as she tilted it. “Are you jealous of me?”

“What? Jealous of my younger self? No way.” Lucille counted down on her fingers. “I might have a smaller net worth than you, and more health problems than you, and less friends than you…oh.”

Comets streaked across the sky. The asteroids were so close that Lucille could see her own sorry, tired reflection in a green jewel jutting out from the front of it.

HSL reached out her hand. “You know the way out. We’ll fly! We will rise on the updraft!”

A gust of wind sent ripples through the grass on the floating island. Lucille joined her doppelganger on the edge, ignoring the pit in her stomach upon seeing just how far they were above the city.

“For the record,” Lucille declared, reluctantly taking HSL’s hand. “Because you’re me, everything you say is technically something I say, so therefore, this was my idea.”

HSL saluted. “Of course, chief!” She turned her gaze back toward the edge of the island. Just one step and she’d be off, into the wider world of writing, of creativity, floating on the updraft into worlds brought out from your head and into the land of the living and conscious. Though her knees buckled and heart raced, Lucille nodded her approval.

Her doppelganger stepped into the open air. “And…off we go!”

They stepped off the island and then they were off the island and Lucille’s stomach lurched as the wind whipped past her and she tumbled through the air thousands of feet above any sort of solid ground. The updraft was nowhere to be found; the two women kept falling, falling, the city rushing up to meet them as GRRM would say.

“Wh-what happened to the updraft?” Lucille spat out as she fell through a patchwork of clouds.

“There’s a reason you didn’t finish your fantasy one-shot!” HSL answered with a grin. “You don’t care for the genre!”

Lucille decided to answer by screaming her lungs out. She could start making out the individual details of the city below - the subway stations, the bridge over the bay, the big field, even the statue she and Regina couldn’t find that one day, that day when she realized something grand and important, and then day switched to night, the asteroids and planetoids were gone, the city’s bright lights captured Lucille’s face full of shock, and then she and her doppelganger crashed through the roof of a dance club, through the bar and dance floor, into the dingy bathrooms illuminated by a single flickering lightbulb.

“That’s more like it,” HSL said jovially, looking no worse for the wear. “The nitty-gritty, everyday experience, that’s what we prefer to write about.”

Lucille’s eyes spun in their sockets as she shook the dust and plaster off of her. When she finally collected herself, she saw her reflection in the mirror and her jaw dropped. Lucille currently sat in a heap of rubble in the corner of the restroom, but the reflection displayed a crying Lucille, one wracked by sobs, one who gripped the sides of the sink so tightly her knuckles turned white.

“This is just a memory from last spring,” Lucille realized while this other version of her cried into the sink. “What’s this got to do with writing?”

HSL rose to her feet. She spoke calmly. “You’ll see.”

Someone held Lucille as she cried. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Regina spoke softly. “You’ll get a job, it’ll be alright. You just gotta keep applying. A lot of companies would be lucky to have you.”

“It’s not just about that,” Memory Lucille whined, rubbing away tears with drunk wrists and hands. “We’re living at the end of the world. Do you ever think about that? There’s a war going on right now, there’s gonna be more wars, we got fascists everywhere, the environment’s going to shit, the rainforests are gonna die, I won’t ever be able to afford a house, the government’s unstable, Mac Jones isn’t a franchise quarterback, I can’t get a job, and I CAN’T GET LAID!”

“God, I’m pathetic,” Lucille and HSL said in unison.

Regina slowly rubbed Lucille’s upper back. “You’ll be alright. Things are tough right now, but you know what? We just need an offensive line for Mac and he’ll be alright.”

Memory Lucille’s sobs slowed into cries, and then, feeling Regina’s soft touch on her, slowed even further into sniffles. “You…you r-really think that’s true? Because Belichick can’t GM for shit...”

“I don’t know for sure,” Regina admitted. “But I do know we’ll be alright. Now c’mon, let’s go home.”

Regina walked Memory Lucille out of the bathroom, the bright lights of the dance floor flooding into the bathroom. Lucille and HSL gazed at Regina until she disappeared as the door closed.

“God, she’s the best,” they said in unison.

But with the memory over, Lucille stood and leaned against the bathroom wall. “And? How’s this related to writing?”

HSL raised her fingers and snapped them. The scene shifted and Lucille’s stomach lurched once again - but when she calmed down, she found herself still in the bathroom. When she saw who stood before her, her jaw slackened.

Luigina stood before a closed bathroom stall door, her eyes narrowed in a rare display of anger.

Inside the stall, Jess slammed her own hand on the floor, sending up a splash of water. “It’s not my fault! Why did we have to be born in a time like this! Why couldn’t we have been born twenty or forty years earlier? Why did we have to be born at the end of the world? It’s this time period, Luigina. When we were born, the game was already rigged from the start. Our only chance of being happy is just tricking ourselves into feeling that way. Making up dreamworlds.”

Lucille glanced down at HSL. “This is…this is Letter From Yokohama. I wrote this last week, trying to age the characters up and all, but I didn’t like it all that much. I was - I mean, Jess was, too cynical. She used to be so happy when she was younger, seeing her cynical like that now that she’s grown up just doesn’t feel right.”

“Your writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” HSL explained as Jess and Luigina argued through the stall door. “Your trauma - writing is your catharsis. It’s your therapy. Because you’re poorer than me, sicker than me, less social than me.” She pointed at the scene in front of them. “That memory from the spring was the genesis for Letter From Yokohama. You make up for your own self-deficiencies by self-inserting into a world where they get solved. And your anxieties about this crazy world we live in - you don’t really talk with Regina and Jackie about it, so you turn to writing to fill that void. Normal people talk with their friends - you talk with your computer, with your hands, on a keyboard, to yourself.”

“What? I don’t talk to myself!” Lucille barked out at her doppelganger. “That’s ridiculous. I live a perfectly healthy life with no need for escapism.”

“You were literally strung out on drugs like a month ago. And you even wrote about that, didn’t you?”

“Shut it!”

The climax of the scene interrupted their bickering.

“The only reason you don’t hate yourself is because you don’t feel anything,” Jess called out from the bathroom.

“Well, I hate you,” Luigina answered. Seeing a character modeled off her best friend in real life (though she definitely wasn’t modeled off her) say something like that sent an arrow through Lucille’s heart. Luigina stormed off, leaving the bathroom - Lucille could see the Regina in her as she departed.

“If Regina ever left me like that,” Lucille mumbled. “I don’t think there’s anything I’m more afraid of.”

She slumped down the bathroom wall, back into a sitting position. “I guess you’re right, HSL. I guess I write just for wish-fulfillment. Finding solutions to my problems when those solutions aren’t appearing in real life.”

Lucille sighed and spoke in unison with Jess in the bathroom stall.

“God, I really am the worst…I’m just like the Chargers.”

After a moment of hugging her knees and burying her head, Lucille glanced up at HSL. “What’s the point of all of this? I thought this was going to be a fun vision quest. But we’re one powerpoint slide away from being episode 25 of Evangelion.”

HSL just shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m just your subconscious. I can only have wordless thoughts and realizations swirl around inside me. You’re the one who has to turn them into something understandable.”

Lucille buried her head again. “Then that means I’m even cynical about my writing. What happened? Things used to be so much fun. I miss the old me.” She shifted her eyes upward to glance at the stall door. “It’s this time period. Why’d I have to be born now? Why we’d have to be born in a time where it’s so easy to visualize your dreams being accomplished, but you know they never will be? To understand what a good life is like, only to end up living in this current hellhole? I want a car and a house and a stable, fulfilling job, but instead…I'm just tired of it all.”

Jess’s sobs drifted from the bathroom stall. 

“Maybe I should’ve just been a medieval peasant,” Lucille continued. “Living in ignorance, dead by forty, but I could’ve drank with the cobbler every night, been best friends with the tailor, believe in a world full of spirits and folklore instead of living in a time where we killed God and nothing fantastical exists outside of fictional stories.”

Lucille narrowed her eyes. “Aw, dammit. I’m talking about my anxieties right now to myself again, aren’t I? Having me as a therapist…I’d feel bad for the patient.”

Amid those low sobs echoing around the bathroom, HSL sat next to Lucille. “Then maybe you oughta stop writing,” she suggested. “You’d be better off writing in a notebook instead of depersonalizing yourself and exploring your problems as a fictional twenty-two-year-old woman. I mean, do you even find writing about Jess and Luigina fun anymore?”

Now that the veil was lifted, Lucille lifted her head and leaned it against the bathroom wall behind her. “Maybe you’re right. They just weren’t made for these times.”

Lucille stood up and wiped her eyes. As Jess’s cries in the stall reached a crescendo, Lucille tightened her fist.

“But these are the times we live in,” she realized. “We don’t get a choice.”

HSL yelped when Lucille grabbed her by the shoulders. “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s being stubborn to a fault,” Lucille declared. “I’m not letting something sorry like this be my grand spiritual revelation of the night. Sorry HSL, but I’m driving the bus on this vision quest now!”

Upon seeing the determined look on Lucille’s face, HSL nodded in approval. “As a good consciousness should.”

Lucille raised a hand. “There has to be more to writing than just me shitting out all of my problems on a word doc. I’ll show you!”

And with that raised hand, Lucille snapped her fingers.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I’LL BE THE ROOOOOUNDABOUT…