Chương 5: Chapter Four

After a solid thirty seconds of cursing and using every swearword I could think of, and a few that I made up on the spot. I sat up and stretched rubbing at my aching neck and eyes. In my discharge paperwork I had a prescription for some Tylenol but I wasn't going to get it filled. It was Tylenol for fucks sake. I already had it in my cupboard. So to combat the rebound headache my mother had brought on I pulled myself up off of the couch and trekked into the bathroom.

I took a handful with a glass of lukewarm water from the tap. Afterward I smacked my lips together and grimaced. It'd been well over 36 hours since I'd brushed my teeth. Between morning breath and unfiltered warm tap water my mouth tasted like the dump. I turned the shower heat up while I brushed my teeth. I stood in the water savoring the burn of it on my skin as I tried to ignore the voice in my head. I hadn't told the doctor about hearing 'level up'.

I still wasn't convinced that I'd heard it at all and now that the headache had lessened it was easier to write off as imagination in a very stressful moment. The phone call with my mom came rushing back and I groaned into the shower spray, choking a little as my dumbass had water go straight down my throat. Thanksgiving was going to be a nightmare and that would be without my mother finding out I got fired.

If my mom found I got fired and wasn't bringing a date she'd probably request I not show up to avoid embarrassing myself. She'd been on my case for the last five years about when I was going to settle down and why I lived in a dumpy apartment and not a nice house with a picket fence with 2. 5 children. And and and and it was always something. That goal post would always be just out of reach no matter how many hoops I jumped through. This time the static came faster.

I stared into it hoping to make sense of the patterns. They shimmered before me but the closer I got the harder my head pounded. I was at it long enough that the water went ice cold. I shivered as I hopped out of the shower and got dressed. It took too long for the chill to leave my body and I was rubbing my hands together as I stared at the microwave. I'd picked out some frozen dinner and the glow illuminated my face in my dark apartment. Does everyone stare at the microwave while their food is cooking?

I mused to myself. The steady hum of the microwave relaxed me and the static flickered across the microwave. BEEP BEEP BEEP I jumped and grabbed the turkey? --yeah, I guess you could qualify it as turkey–out of the microwave and sat down sideways on the sofa to consume it. My legs up on the couch bent at the knees with my old blanket pulled around me. One hand supported my plate while the other shoveled food into my mouth.

I barely tasted the rubbery food as I concentrated on trying to unfocus my eyes and break through to see the static. I'd been practicing, I realized. I was learning to unfocus, to detach myself and disassociate. It was a muscle that I hadn't known I could flex and every time I did I seemed to be able to tap into it a little more quickly with a little more control. The ringing came, the pressure and the pain but I pushed through it determined to see that which had been eluding me.

And then I saw it, it was clearer and more coherent than it had been previously. Symbols ran across every surface so familiar but strange at the same time. It reminded me of mathematical formulas or computer code, something organized and purposeful.

"What are you?" I asked out loud, "What does this mean?" The code didn't answer. It shimmered, indifferent to my questions. The language it was written in was far beyond what I could hope to understand. Hell I could barely perceive it. But something caught my eye. A flicker down near the bottom of my vision. A small section, only several symbols long, was blinking. Almost as if it were waiting for input. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I focused on it, the shape of the symbols, something was so familiar about them. I pushed at the blinking section. What if I reached out and changed it? The moment I did, the world turned on its side. The pressure behind my eyes exploded and as white hot pain lanced through my skull I was half convinced I'd honestly gone blind or one of my eyeballs had actually burst. My stomach heaved as the world came back into focus. My feet tangled in the blanket and I fell off the couch.

I scrambled to my feet before my body decided that it didn't know which direction up was. I slid my half finished, half spilled meal on the table as I rushed to the bathroom. My hands supported me on my journey there using the walls to help keep the world facing the correct direction. The code was still visible, unlike before it hadn't vanished. My skin felt wrong, as if it were too tight on my body. My eyes burned and watered. My stomach did a somersault as my insides felt like they were rearranging themselves.

I made it to the toilet just in time. I won't describe the next bit in detail. Suffice it to say microwaved turkey tastes better the first time. Between heaves, I caught glimpses of myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked like death. Worse than that maybe. I was pale, sweating, my right eye had burst a blood vessel and there was dried blood down my face and neck. My cheeks were sunken and I looked as though I had nothing left to give.

"Okay" I gasped, gripping onto the toilet bowl since it was now the only stable thing in the universe.

"Okay, message received. Too much. Got it." My body disagreed. It had more opinions to express. I don't know how long I stayed there on the bathroom floor. I dozed between dry heaves, the cool tiles becoming a sacred oasis of relief. I finally felt safe to move and stood on my two very shaky legs. I splashed water on my face and scrubbed at the blood on my face with my hands. I looked like someone who had seen a war, or a really aggressive flu.

They don't really have a go to for the particular state of beauty that comes with 'accidentally touching reality and therefore experiencing complete body rebellion.' I slowly made my way back to the couch, grabbing a sports drink on my way past the counter where I'd discarded them after the hospital. Had that only been this morning? I grabbed my blanket off of the floor and wrapped myself in it. The code was gone, or at the very least faint enough to ignore.

The pressure in my head had reduced to an incessant ache that may or may not have been exacerbated by my unhealthy relationship to coffee and all adjacent beverages. I opened my eyes as my brain caught up to my situation. I held the edge of the blanket up level with my vision and squinted in the dark apartment. I turned on the side lamp next to the couch.

"Holy shit" I whispered. The raggedy blanket I'd refused to part with since middle school was no longer a dingy cream color and instead was a warm chocolate brown. I gathered the blanket off of me and examined it thoroughly. The seams, the fabric, the faded barely legible tag. I even found a stain from the time a tray of jello shots got spilled on it in college. The snag in the corner that was comforting when I would rub it subconsciously during stressful moments. I did this. I changed the color of my blanket.

Then my brain decided it was going to have a full on civil war with my stomach. But I touched the blanket's code and changed it. That change manifested in reality. LEVEL UP The voice again. Unmistakable. The notification confirmed that yes, I had done something significant. But more importantly, whatever was sending it waited for me to notice the blanket before sending the notification.

"Hello?" I said, feeling foolish.

"Can you hear me? What does level up mean? Is there a tutorial or an FAQ? YouTube video? I spent quite some time trying various key words or phrases to call the voice back, to get some kind of explanation. So long that my throat was raw and raspy by the time I was done. I started laughing, which further hurt my throat. That laughter became coughing which may have become sobbing for a while before turning into laughter again. I clutched the brown blanket to my chest like it would disappear if I let go.

I was shaking with exhaustion, lack of food, terror and something else, something that felt almost, a little bit like hope and excitement.