Chương 3: Chapter Two

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. It was an invader in the most private place, my own head, but there was no aggression, no emotion at all really. Just a clear genderless statement and as quickly as it appeared it was gone. LEVEL UP I jerked back so hard my chair rocked. The static on the poster vanished and the vice released on my head. Reality snapped back into focus like being interrupted in the middle of reading as my ears tried to process what Rebecca was saying to me.

I felt something wet begin to slide down my face and drip onto the design that I had been so proud of. The design someone stole and set me up.

"... Are you okay, Miss Marion? Samantha?" Greg and Rebecca were both staring at me. Both of their chairs were scooted back from the table. Whether that was to assist me or run from me I'll never know.

"I…" I blinked and looked at the poster. Just a normal poster on a normal beige wall.

"I… don't know."

"We'll have someone escort you to collect your things." She handed me a tissue from her conveniently placed box beneath the table.

"Do you require an ambulance?" I forced my eyes from the wall to meet hers.

"An ambulance?" She gestured at my face.

"I'm okay. Just a lot to process. I didn't do this, I worked very hard on this rebranding. When you find who did this–and I'm guessing Daniel Park. I hope you sue them into oblivion." They exchanged another look before picking up the phone in the conference room to call in security. How fucking embarassing. I stood up on legs that prickled with every movement as if they'd both fallen asleep. As I accepted another handful of tissues I stole another glance at the wall and the poster. Did I just have an aneurysm?

What the actual hell. Security arrived within moments, a large man named Terrence Nathanson. He was a sweet man who I had always liked. He tended succulents on his desk. From his 'daughter in art school,' he'd always say with a smile. I had suspected they were plastic but who was I to ruin his dream of having kept something alive for two years. He wouldn't meet my eyes as he walked me to my desk to pack my things.

"I'm sorry Samantha." he said quietly.

"I never imagined having to do this for you too."

"Thanks, Terrence." I wanted to ask what he meant but at this point all I could think about was my work being stolen, getting fired and the weird static that may or may not have been a medical episode. I tried to hide behind Terrance as we made my way to my desk. I didn't want my coworkers to see me. It was impossible of course and the cacophony of speculative whispers began almost immediately. My desk was exactly as I'd left it this morning. Laptop on its dock with the dual monitors displaying my log in screen.

The mug Kate had given me my first year here that said, "WORLD'S OKAYEST DESIGNER", A framed photo of me and my college roommate at graduation, both of us grinning but refusing to fill the space between us. Terrence handed me a cardboard box. I set the photo and mug inside of it. From the desk I found my headphones and spare phone charger. Several pens that were all from Kate and all the opposite of professional. Way in the back I found a box of granola bars that I'd forgotten about. Probably well past expiration.

That was it. After eight years I could be moved out in a box that could be carried with one hand. I reached for the laptop to slide it into my bag out of habit.

"Leave the laptop," he said.

"Company property."

"Right." Of course they wanted it, for their 'investigation' or more likely so that I couldn't contact coworkers or my clients.

"Are you ready?" He asked gently.

"I'll walk you out." I nodded and picked up the box. It weighed almost nothing. We were halfway to the elevator when Kate was screaming my name.

"Samantha! Sam! Wait!" Her face was stricken, "Sam. What's going on?"

"I can't fully explain right now, but someone set me up and they're saying my Allmart designs were stolen from some small chain in PA. I think Daniel had something to do with it." She stared at me.

"Why are you bleeding?" I looked down. The front of my blouse was covered in blood droplets and I had a wad of bloody tissues pressed to my face. The elevator dinged and I quickly attempted to make her laugh,"You should see the other guy." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. She didn't laugh, instead her mouth did this open and close thing that reminded me of the aquarium.

"I'll call you," I promised as the elevator doors closed between us. The parking garage was cool and had the unique parking garage smell of oil, cigarettes and stale air. I walked to my car on autopilot, loaded the box into the back seat and sat behind the wheel. It took me a long time before I was able to start the engine. The numbness was wearing off and the dread was setting in. My entire life and the plans I'd been working so hard toward had just imploded. I had no idea where to go from here.

The thing that I kept coming back to was, 'why?' I'd never had a conflict with anyone at work. Had I done something to Daniel to make him act this way? Was it simply greed? How had I not noticed, while we weren't friends we were certainly friendly. The ringing in my ears was growing in volume again as my eyes unfocused. The wall in front of my parking space was the same as it always was, chipped white paint and familiar scuff marks. Or was it?

The scuff that I'd seen thousands of times was blurring, vibrating, breaking apart into static. The blood that I'd only recently staunched began dripping down my face again jarring me back to reality. Nausea rolled over me and I reached for some old fast food napkins in my center console to contain my bloody nose. Maybe I should go to the hospital. I'd heard a voice. One that I was almost completely positive hadn't been Rebecca or Greg. It had to have been some type of auditory hallucination brought on by stress.

But it hadn't felt like a hallucination. Maybe that was what a hallucination was, after all, I'd never had one before–well as far as I knew. I took a deep breath and rolled up one of the napkins into a make-shift nose tampon. I shoved it up my nose and grabbed two over the counter migraine pills from the glove box. I swallowed them dry and rubbed my eyes. This was all some horrible stress migraine and I needed to get home and take an abortive pill so that I could focus and make a plan.

That's exactly what I needed right now, a plan. My apartment was exactly as I'd left it. The traitorous coffee machine was still blinking: ERR: K8ACV The grey walls, grey carpet, stock photo perfect uncomfortable furniture. Everything was there, so why then did everything feel different.

"Okay," I said out loud.

"Okay, Sam. You're going to prove you're not having a psychotic break. This is a stress induced migraine. You're going to stare at this wall and nothing will happen. Then you will take a migraine pill, set your alarm for ninety minutes and get to work sorting this mess out." I set my box on the table and stared at the wall. Nothing happened. I let out a laugh that sounded more than a little hysterical and as I went to turn away I saw it.

The portrait of Nicolas Cage, the picture was meant to look like a painting of a wartime hero or something from the 1800s. The matte was fuzzy. The crisp straight lines where the matte met the painting were bleeding together. I turned suddenly, staring straight at the painting. It was gone. I forgot about my migraine pill, and my ninety minute nap and sat transfixed on the edge of my table trying to get the static to reappear. It felt like one of those Magic Eye posters that had been so popular in the nineties.

The harder I looked the further away the sailboat was. The rational explanations were there trying to convince me of themselves, for better or worse I couldn't tell you. These were stress induced hallucinations, schizophrenia, maybe bipolar disorder, maybe I'd accidentally consumed something poisonous and this was a bad trip. I was even hoping that maybe it was a brain tumor. I should go to the hospital, or call someone to come help me.

I should try to make sure this wasn't some horrid nightmare I'd yet to wake up from. Instead, I tried various techniques to reactivate the static. Even the logical part of my brain wasn't certain that I was going crazy, that the voice in my head was nothing more than imaginary. It felt more real than anything else I could remember. I pounded my fist on my thighs.

"Come on! Why won't you appear! What was I doing when it appeared? Well, getting fired obviously. At the time I'd been what? I had been overwhelmed and dissociated while my brain kind of rebooted. I wasn't thinking about anything. I took a deep breath and I tried to recreate the mental state that I was in. That feeling of disconnect, of being outside of my body. Of letting go. I unlocked my phone and tapped my meditation app. I used it a lot to quiet my mind enough to sleep, maybe it would work here too.

I closed my eyes. I let the white noise and soothing voice guide me to a state of relaxation. Once my thoughts stilled I opened my eyes. The static was back. It was faint but there. TV snow layered over the picture, the meditation app calmed me and as I watched the static start to organize. It started slowly. First I could see lines, rows that symbols organized themselves on. Then the absence of symbols. Space appeared around each one that allowed one to be defined from its neighbor.

Patterns emerged and I could almost see structure within the chaos. The ringing started again. I dismissed it at first as part of my meditation soundtrack, but as it became louder and more encompassing I winced as my head pounded trying to parse everything it was experiencing. I could taste copper and my apartment took on a smell like the air preceding a thunderstorm. Something unidentifiable but buried so deep in our brains we recognized it anyway.

The pressure built and it felt like my skull was shrinking around its contents. My tongue was too big, too thick in my mouth, my eyes ached from being swollen in their sockets. Pressure. An immense pressure that coupled with pain and nausea was all I could think about. It was paralyzing, and I stayed. I leaned into the pain, I needed to see I needed to know. Every hair on my body stood on end and a tingling rolled over me in waves. It was similar to the feeling of getting jolted by electricity.

Touching an electric fence as a kid, or licking a 9V battery, except I couldn't let go. Or maybe I just didn't want to. The pressure spiked and sharp pain lanced through my skull. The room lit up symbols shimmered across every surface. I became more than myself and I understood in that moment that everything that I believed, everything that I thought to be true was wrong. My skin was on fire, my skull on the verge of exploding when I finally jerked back in pain.

The static vanished, the ringing dissolved back into meditative white noise, the smell faded but the taste lingered copper and metallic. I understood why when I noticed the blood slowly dripped from my nose onto the growing puddle on the floor. Drip. Drip. Drip.

"Well, shit. I think I'm dying."