The Weird and The Violent

Violence was first introduced to his life when he was walking back to his home one winter afternoon. He was either coming back from work or a walk around the neighborhood, he couldn’t say for sure. On his way back, he noticed frantic movement in one of the frosted windows that lined the apartment complex he was walking by. He stopped for a moment and squinted, trying to see the moving shapes with more clarity.

While it wasn’t clear what they were doing, after careful observation, he decided that the moving shapes were human-shaped. They came into and out of view frequently; they moved quickly, with a vague hint of coordination. The way they ebbed and swayed reminded him of a dance. He would at most see three distinct figures at once; they gestured and articulated to each other in explosive movements.

In a flash, one of the figures raised its arm and brought it down on something with tremendous force. In concert with the movement of the arm, a thick, milky white liquid burst onto the window pane. The frost around where the liquid sprayed immediately melted. The figure kept repeating the same motion, and the other two figures gradually froze in place. More liquid splattered each time. It took him some time, but he finally realized what was happening. He was witnessing something, or someone, being bludgeoned to death.

To his mild surprise, he didn’t run or notify anybody. He simply stood there, in a trance, and watched on as his reality was infiltrated.

The window was slick and heavy with the liquid once the figure completed their task. The stains, now gelid from the cold, were making it even harder to see into the apartment. From the little he could make out, he noticed the figure, abnormally tall, now loosely looking in his direction.

While their eyes didn’t necessarily meet, the glance was enough to wake him up. With a jolt running down his spine, he resumed his walk back home. He was taking quick, floaty steps. Almost jogging. 

He was not scared, nor panicked, not really. He was unsure. The thought that what he saw was not the entirety of the things happening to him was beginning to fester within him. 

Why did he have to be the one to witness it? The truth is that whether it was him or someone entirely unrelated didn’t matter in the slightest. The cosmos had simply placed him there. That’s how things worked, or rather, had worked.

He didn’t look back to check if he was followed even once. He turned the corner to his street and approached the apartment complex he lived in. Gripped the metal handle of the front door that was cold enough to burn him and pushed.

The stairwell and entrance were well lit, mailboxes overflowing with mail. He slowed down, the comfort of familiarity had soothed his nerves. The wrongness, however, proved stubborn. He made his way up to his floor through the stairs. The closer he got to his floor, the heavier and more fetid it got. It smelled like the rotting kelp deposited on basalt stones during low tide. The smell conjured up memories of the black-sand beaches of the town he was born in. Salty, mineral, with a hint of ammonia.

The source of the smell was unmissable. As soon as he reached his floor, he came across the freshly slaughtered corpse of an immense cow. It was lying on the floor in a sitting pose, its legs folded towards its torso. There was a very thin arc of blood along its thick neck where the cut was made. If it wasn’t for the congealed blood pooled around the head, one could think the cow simply sleeping. 

He noted the absence of the scent of iron. 

Her immense body choked the narrow landing, so large in fact that it was blocking the door to his apartment. It was physically impossible for a beast of this size to have been dragged here. Maybe she had always been here, only visible now. 

The silhouette of the tawny cow against the drab grey of the concrete was jarring. It was as if the inner wrong that was steadily growing within him was now projected onto the world. In the simplest manner of speaking, the scene was false. Something essentially grim and fatal.

Before, he might have been baffled. Unfortunately, this was not the case. With a nauseating click, the nonsense before him started making sense. In a way he couldn’t put into words, he knew why the cow was here, exactly before his door. He had to climb over it.

He approached the cow from the side. Placed his hands on her hide and lifted himself up. She was still warm, as warm as she would have been when she was alive. He lifted his legs over the back of the cow and vaulted over her. He was now standing in the cramped space between the cow and his door. 

He put his keys in. He could feel the whole door vibrate through the grip he had on his keys. The vibration was accompanied by a low hum. He unlocked his door and took one last breath before meeting his destiny. He knew very well what awaited him.

As soon as he entered his unlit apartment, a strong wind pushed against his whole body, his entire essence. Even as he struggled to keep his eyes open, he could see the outlines of the trio cloaked in shadow. They had come to collect what was once given freely, as a gift.

Young liege of the Middle Plains, Your subjects are torn asunder.

I only realized that I had been running for some time when the gums of the bottom row of my teeth started tingling like struck glass with every breath. The subway stop I got off at was farther from my destination than I had planned, which meant I had to sprint to make it in time. 

I had taken the urban train, which carried me from the northern part of the city, where my humble but warm residence was situated, across the winding river that split the city in two, to the southern part, home to the commercial districts. 

I was unfamiliar with the south side of town, which I reasoned was the culprit of my lateness, since I had gotten off at a stop nowhere near the building I was headed to. As expected of someone who was out and about in the commercial district around 8 AM, my purpose was business-related. I was headed to a job interview, my first one in fact, after I had graduated from a local college with a degree in something or the other, with grades that could be only described as unremarkably mediocre.

While it was my first interview indeed, it had been a couple of years since my graduation ceremony. I had spent the past years drifting from pursuit to pursuit, taking up whatever piqued my interest in that moment in time. I was able to do this because of my frugal nature, coupled with help from my parents, who were sufficiently wealthy to support their only child. 

The reason for me, out of nowhere, seeking a job was so tired that I tried to refute it in my mind over and over in order to keep at least a semblance of self-determination, at least within my own being. It was because of the ever-increasing pressure, a pressure not entirely dissimilar to the pressure a child feels on their shoulders as an expectant father places his hands on them, from the social norm that one needed to fulfill their duties to society and earn their own keep. 

I had gotten this social-norm virus from my peers who now had careers and families of their own. I am calling it a virus because it wasn't a feeling that filled me with aspiration; instead, it had a sickly quality I still can’t quite describe. It was like looking at something that was only half-formed, emerging from a rotting and damaged cocoon, the emergent chrysalis lumpy and misshapen, lacking both the cuteness of a caterpillar and the grace of a butterfly.

Wrestling with these thoughts, I hadn’t noticed that I had already made it to the street where the company building was located. Upon checking my wristwatch and seeing that I had about a quarter of an hour left before my appointment, I was filled with a vague pride in my athletic abilities, since to run that distance in the time that I had, one would require above-average physical faculties. Nonetheless, this pride was also accompanied by a sneaking sense of surprise, as I wouldn’t ever describe myself as someone athletic. The inner surprise I felt was then expanded into an external one. 

The regional headquarters of the international corporation, Proliferation, where I had applied to work, was located on a street I would describe as only a few steps up from a back alley. I hadn’t noticed my surroundings while in a rush, but the cramped street was lined with aging, grey, nondescript work centers. They were so alike in their proportions and blemishes that the notion occurred to me, with an odd certainty, that they’d been fabricated in a single distant facility, shipped here in bulk, and set down without regard for the logic of a city populated by humans. Deployed streets, I thought to myself. 

The street itself was not dirty by any means, but it had the tell-tale signs of being a little unkempt: cracked and discolored asphalt, sidewalks crumbling in places. There was no one on the street other than me, which surprised me, since it was still rush hour. I had expected to see polished men and women in work outfits, scurrying toward a towering office building with coffee in hand. My dread towards getting a soulless job, a job that was either soulless by design or merely imitative of a soul, was deepening. 

To add to this desolate scene, the street seemed designed in a way that was uninterested in pedestrian use. No restaurants, no supermarkets, nothing. Only office buildings that repeated ad nauseam. The only symptom of humanity on this concrete vista was the indoor lighting seeping from some of the office windows, their glass shaded with a blueish-black tint. The darkened quality was making it hard to see what might have been happening inside these ambiguous offices whose purpose I could only approach with guesses. At brief intervals, I could see shapes, like smoke tendrils, moving behind the thick glass panes, swirling into outlines suggestive of human bodies, gesturing to unseen objects, and then dissolving into the vague light.

Snapping out of this grey trance, I shifted my attention to the regional headquarters I was supposed to enter for my initiation. Proliferation Corp was extremely wealthy and influential; even a vagrant like me had heard of their world-spanning ventures, even in the remotest crevices of the world, and how these ventures rewarded the company with riches beyond possibility. The building they decided to erect in this rather backwater town was testament to that. Similarly unadorned, like the other workspaces it shared this small, hidden street with. It was still several floors higher than all the other “iterated” buildings. It was also constructed, at least its outer facade from what I could tell, from a different material than the shorter buildings. The lesser buildings were simple, grey concrete products of an architectural brutalism that I was not used to in the northern district of the city. In contrast, the Proliferation tower was built from a very lustrous-looking, polished dark green stone, almost black, reminiscent of the marble temples ancient humans might have seen.

I took a few shaky, almost involuntary steps toward the glass door, like a newborn fawn. My mind lagged, tangled in questions about why Proliferation would want someone like me, someone who had done little in their life besides squandering time. The more I considered it, the more my self-doubt twisted into a vague suspicion of the whole ordeal. Wanting a job simply out of social obligation didn’t resemble anything I had ever done. The job description itself was also painfully vague. Maybe this was a targeted scam, a pyramid scheme of sorts.

Before any of these thoughts resolved, I realized my hand was already on the door handle. I buried the doubts wherever they came from, just another manifestation of the long-standing unease that something in my life had always been fundamentally misplaced, and pushed my way inside.

The lobby was largely featureless. Greyish walls that had streaks of black running through them, natural stone, I thought. The only decoration the space had was the handful of paintings that were displayed on the walls. 

A tropical jungle tangled with all sorts of ground vegetation, moss, and trees; complete with a plethora of crawling insects, reptiles, and molluscs emerging from the ground, from among the leaves, from tree nooks, everywhere really. Everything depicted seemed to have a sheen to it, as if it were covered by a slime-like substance. Another painting, this one depicting an underwater chasm that looked like a mouth trying to gulp down the ocean. A third one, of a pride of lions with matted fur that’s dark red around the muzzle and neck. The last and most peculiar one, hung on the wall to the right of the entrance, was a liminal scene: a hospital room lit by sunlight, and its unoccupied bed.

 A receptionist's desk was positioned exactly opposite the entrance, with a wall behind it interrupted by two corridors, one at each end. A frail-looking woman occupied the desk, her gaze fixed on a computer screen as she typed rapidly.

I approached the counter, and the woman lifted her head with a single smooth motion to meet my gaze. Under the artificial glow of her monitor, her sunken features were more pronounced, her blue eyes glassy like a doll’s.

“Welcome to Proliferation. How may we help you today?”

“Uh, hello, I’m here to interview for the entry-level position. I applied online.”

Her face briefly shifted into an expression of surprise, as though she wasn’t expecting interviewees today. She glanced at her screen, then glanced back at me, then back at the screen.

“Alright,” she said, “can you please identify yourself and state your purpose of visit?”

“My name is Devon Richards, and again, I'm here for the entry-level position.”

“Alright, can you please identify yourself and state your purpose of visit again?”

She hadn’t typed anything. Instead, she angled her head to the right, turning her left ear toward me.

Assuming she couldn’t hear me, I repeated myself, louder.

“I’m Devon Richards. I'm here for the entry-level position.”

She turned her head back. Focusing on a point between my chin and sternum, she asked again without making eye contact, her voice dissolving into a whisper now.

“Please state your purpose one last time. For confirmation.”

I was starting to get annoyed: my nervousness and the adrenaline from the run, I assumed, were making me lightheaded. The electric buzz from the overhead light fixtures was moving further away, tilting the entire lobby to the edge of silence.

“I’m here for the interview.”

She gave a confirmational nod, and with it came back the drone of the lights. Feverishly typing away, still not looking up at me.

“We would like to welcome you again, Mr. Richards. Sorry for the earlier complication; the registration system was acting up for a moment there. Your interview will take place in room 108. To enter the room, please hold the interviewee badge we’ll provide you with up to the keycard reader next to the door. You will find the room by going down either hallway and turning left at the elevator. We wish you vigorous development, Mr. Richards.”

She slid the badge towards me, and her eyes met mine in what felt like forever. Her eyes didn’t look doll-like anymore. Looping the badge around my neck by its straps, it occurred to me that I was presented with a choice - either hallway. As if this were a common confusion in this building, she gently added:

“Don’t worry. Either hallway leads to the same place. Just a design choice from when this building was first constructed.” 

Picking the right hallway on a whim, I started heading towards it. Just before the walls on either side blocked out my peripheral vision from seeing into the lobby, I noticed that the receptionist was following me with her eyes. 

The hallway was similarly featureless, like the lobby. One immediate difference I noticed was the difference in the walls. The walls were simple plaster, painted an unsaturated red. The entire length of the corridor was illuminated by dim fluorescent lights, a few of which flickered like candles.

The carpeted floors of the building were muffling and hiding away the sounds of my footsteps. Almost as if no one was here, not even me, it was quiet, save for the constant electrical hum from the lights. Another peculiarity of the carpet was its unusually thick weave for an office building and its lack of wear. 

Everything in the hallway blended into each other. The walls, ceiling, and carpet were all the same dull red color. The dimness and the hallway's almost tunnel-like length made it hard to see the end, where the elevator was supposed to be. Throughout my journey to the interview room, I didn’t notice any doors along the corridor that might lead to other rooms. The number 108 had made me think that I’d see other rooms. Through the walk, the only change in my sensations was olfactory. The more I walked down the corridor, the stronger a particular smell became. Earthy and slightly tangy, it reminded me of freshly baked bread and fruit that was just about to rot. The smell's growing strength made me feel I was headed in the right direction.

Just when I became aware of how long I’ve been walking, I spotted the steel elevator. The digital screen on it read floor zero. As I was informed, the corridor split into two paths at this point, one going left and one going right. This was the only junction in the entire hallway; nowhere did the hallway to the left of the lobby, that supposedly also led here, meet the one I was in. 

I looked to my left, expecting to see the interview room, but I was met by a cramped, lone workstation with its computer turned off. The desk was surrounded on three sides by the red walls, almost touching them. Looking to my right, I spotted the room plaque above the doorway that read “108”. Turning my back on the poorly lit workstation, I approached the door to the room where my initiation into the work force would take place.

My ears were ringing again as another intense shot of adrenaline began coursing through me. With sweaty hands, I held the card around my neck up to the reader. A digital jingle followed by a robotic female voice saying, “Welcome, Mr. Richards.” Hearing my own name spoken back to me from that panel assured me that the receptionist had made no mistake. The lock on the door was undone shortly, and I entered the room.

Before I could register anything, a wave of putrid stench engulfed my senses. My mouth immediately filled with reflux, and my vision went blurry from the sudden onset of tears. Another moment and it was like my olfactory nerves had already stopped firing, save for the acidic burning sensation in the back of my throat. I would have been thoroughly convinced I had simply hallucinated the stench if the interviewer, sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, hadn’t said the building's AC system gets like this every year around this time and starts stinking up the place. I felt I shouldn’t have let him see me overwhelmed. My stomach was beginning to knot.

“Please take a seat, Mr. Richards,” he said with a polished smile, and I did as I was told.

“I am Kevin Morney, and I will be interviewing you for the position you applied for. And before we begin, and we shouldn’t really tell you this, but this interview is mostly a formality; corporate has already decided on having you on board. So, you know, you can unclench.” 

Two quick blinks, then he chuckled as if he was jabbing at something. His laughter had reverb to it. When he settled a bit, technical jargon started oozing out from his mouth: the responsibilities of my position, or my benefits, or my insurance, or something like that. My heartbeat and tremors had settled down, and I was nodding now and then to whatever he was saying, looking around the room to occupy myself. Same walls, same carpet, same lights. Two doors behind him on either side. 

“...with that, we can start the questionnaire now. If you don’t have any questions for me, of course.” Modest smile, relaxed expression, and neatly combed hair. Everything about his presentation was something out of a brochure; curated perfection.

“Crystal clear. We can go ahead with the questionnaire.” He knew I hadn’t listened.

“Excellent. This might feel a bit strong right off the bat, but we would like to get to know you, Devon. Is it all right if I call you Devon? You can also call me Kevin if you’d like.”

“No problems there, Kevin.” Of course I would say that. Even if I had a problem, I still wanted the job. I didn’t buy the whole formality talk.

“Peeeerfect. So, from what I understand, this will be your first time working in a corporate environment after taking a couple of gap years out of college. Would you please elaborate on why that gap in your resume exists and why you chose Proliferation as your first place of employment?”

Quite predictable. I heard myself answering with my borrowed corporate tone. I was spinning my web of half-truths about how I spent those years working as a self-employed art gallery owner, how it developed my interpersonal skills as I dealt with capricious artist types who made up my main clientele, and the rest of the details coalesced into something plausible. I was not prepared for the second part of the question, and I couldn’t have been. I had no idea why I had picked Proliferation out of the countless big-name corps I could have applied to. Something resembling an answer was struggling to form in my mind, but I didn’t know how I could express it with language.

I opened my mouth, then closed it. 

I did it once more.

Kevin laughed. It had even more reverb this time around, and I felt my leg muscles cramp. For a brief second, as he was laughing, the thought that his mouth appeared too deep for his face crossed my mind.

“That answer will suffice for now.” His demeanor seemed abnormally relaxed to me, but maybe it was because this was my first time in an interview, and he had already lost count.

“What would you rate your skills in Microsoft Excel out of ten?”

“A solid eight. I constantly used it for inventory and finance tracking for my gallery.”

“Stellar. Proliferation is a dynamic, collaborative body. We work in groups within our branch and also with different branches. How well do you perform in ecosystems that require competition as well as collaboration?”

“If I understand correctly, you are asking me how well I do as a team member, is that right?”

“Yes. Yes, you could put it like that.”

“The people skills I acquired during self-employment really allow me to move with a ‘social grease’, one could say. The fact that I was the sole executive in the gallery also provided me with ample leadership experience if the situation ever calls for it.” 

His eyes widened and then narrowed immediately, almost reflexively.

“Aspiring for higher is always appreciated in Proliferation, Devon.” He set the document he was reading from aside.

“Do you have fear in your life?”

The hair on my nape stood as if electrified. I furrowed my brow at the question. Kevin sat there, placid smile on his face, waiting for an answer. Maybe my reaction was enough of an answer.

“I take on anything I encounter with determination and grit. I try not to focus on the fear.” My voice was betraying my feelings.

“Fear is a good thing, Mr. Richards. It helps an organism survive in unwinnable circumstances; you and I need it. It was a rhetorical question anyway, I knew the answer.” 

“Excuse me for a moment, I’m feeling terribly stiff.” He smoothly put up his arms to either side and stretched like he was rowing. Audible cracks sounded from both of his shoulder joints at exactly the same time. He then angled his head carefully towards each shoulder one by one until he heard a crack. His neck was so flexible that his head was almost touching his shoulders. After he was satisfied with his stretches, he put the document he had put aside in front of him once again, and for some reason, the distance between our seats felt shorter. So short, in fact, that I could now see what was written on the document. Yet I couldn’t read as it was so densely written on.

“The next portion of the questionnaire will be conducted from behind you.” Without thinking, I turned my body halfway to look. Kevin looked at me with an expression I couldn’t place. I stopped, and his head shifted, correcting his posture.

“Please do not turn around.”

This must be the corpo-psych stuff their HR must have come up with, I thought. Coupled with the previous question, they must be evaluating some kind of disposition or the other. A complacency test, I thought.

Kevin wore his signature smile. I instinctively returned it as best as I could. No sounds were coming from behind me, nothing to indicate that anything was being “conducted”. A minute or so must have passed in complete silence, and I was growing acutely aware of the amount I was sweating. I looked at the desk and our surroundings for visual cues to see if there was something happening behind me, taking care not to turn my head too much. Shadows, reflections, anything. But nothing. I was seeing nothing. Or at least I was dismissing the small things I saw as nothing. 

Brief changes in the reflection in Kevin's eyes. Nothing much, could very well have been caused by the subtle movements of his head. Though he appeared to be standing so very still, so much so in fact that not even the rise and fall of his breath was detectable. Maybe something behind his eyes and the bridge of his nose was moving. I was disoriented, and my own thoughts weren’t making sense to me.

“Thank you for standing still. This segment is now complete. You are now ‘out of the woods’ so to speak. We have a couple wrap-up questions left to go through, but they won’t be as tough as the ones you answered up until now.”

What could he have learned about me in the, frankly, weird 5 minutes or so we had spent together? The questions, for lack of a better word, appeared superficial or nonsensical to me. ‘Tough’ wouldn’t be the word I’d use to describe them. 

As I was puzzling out what the process I’ve been going through might be for, Kevin jumped out of his seat.

“We’ll have to relocate for the remaining questions,” was all he offered me in the way of an explanation. With a briskness I had not expected of him, he was already standing before the door on the left side of the room. Gesticulating in the air for me to come over.

For a moment, I felt his veneer of professionalism dissolve. His face had turned reddish and shiny with sweat. I could see veins bulging along his temples.

I rose from my seat, and, unsure of why we had to relocate for a simple questionnaire, took some steps towards the door. Standing up had dispelled some of the torpor I was induced into by the rancid smell and the incomprehensible interview. I thought about coming up with an excuse and leaving through the door I had entered from. Then I imagined walking down the uniform hallway and exiting out of the lobby, then I continued on towards Kevin.

As soon as I was in range, he placed his left hand on my right shoulder. His ash-gray suit had concealed his musculature. When his hand fell on my shoulder, I felt my bones compress.

“We’ll be there in a second.”                    

He opened the door and ushered me in with a swift motion. I saw him enter through the door soon after me, but lost sight of him almost immediately. Forgive me if my descriptions don’t make sense. This is the best I can muster.

The room, or rather space, I was now in was uniform. I use “uniform” here in the truest sense of the word. Unlike the hallway, which was architecturally uniform, this space had no discernible edges or objects within. A vast nothingness that was tinted an orangeish red. It was receiving light from some unseen source as it was fairly bright, but again, I failed to spot it. Maybe the light was not coming from within the space but somewhere from outside, which would make the boundaries of this void, at least slightly, permeable to light. How an ‘outside’ could exist here was something I couldn’t explain.

I looked down to see what I was standing on, but as expected, it was just more uniform nothingness. I walked around a bit, trying to find any kind of physical boundary, like a wall that I could feel out. Even as I walked around, I found nothing. I was not even sure if I was moving at all.

After a while, I stopped and just waited. I felt what I had to do was maybe just wait. As I waited, I caught a whiff of that now-familiar bready scent. It was pleasant, unlike the interview room, and grew stronger the longer I waited. 

I don’t know how long I waited in that room, maybe minutes, maybe hours, maybe days and months, but at some point, the already bright light gradually became so strong that I couldn’t really see anything. Then something grabbed my shoulders and pulled me towards somewhere.

When my eyes adjusted, I was back in the same room. Kevin was moving towards his seat. He must’ve been the one who pulled me here. He sat and gestured to the seat I had been sitting in before our relocation, urging me to take it.

When I sat down, the seat was still warm. The room looked exactly the same as the one from before.

But was it? I hadn’t noticed the rubber plant behind Kevin before, close to the door on the right. It was a small detail that I might have missed before. Maybe it was always there. The desk was smaller, too. He was closer.

I looked at Kevin, expecting some sort of explanation from him.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect that you would make it this far. Most don’t.” That was the only time he sort of acknowledged the orange-red void. He never mentioned it again.

“Are you familiar with project management software like Slack?”

“Not really, no.”

“Well, that’s alright. You’ll learn on the job. Are you comfortable working flexible hours and the occasional unpaid overtime?”

This fucking bastard. That last question got a physical reaction out of me. Like a camera aperture, my vision snapped into focus. I could count the individual pores on Kevin’s face now. Notice his tendons shifting and bulging beneath his skin when he moved. The muscle fibers on my limbs tightened like steel coils, straining against my bones. My mouth was disgustingly wet. Kevin’s cologne had a metallic scent. 

I refocused, “That won’t be a problem.” I said through a tense jaw.

Looking back on it, the best course of action for me probably would have been to exit the room after we relocated from the orange void. But I didn’t. For some reason, this all felt like a joke that only I wasn’t in on, like Kevin was some sort of actor in a prank show. I was curious to see how this all ends.

“If I told you we already hired you and that you were already working for us for some time, would you like to meet that version of yourself?” He tilted his head to the side. Towards the door on my right.

Was it rhetorical? Or was there something to be seen behind that door? I fixed my gaze on Kevin’s pupils and stared him down.

“I would like to embody that version rather than being an observer of it.”

Kevin finally dropped his omnipresent smile for the first time. It vaporized at a moment's notice. With the new, horrifically neutral expression, his features were sharper than ever. However, I felt like my answer was the closest thing to the truth that I could blurt out.

He leaned uncomfortably close to me. “We are done. You are hired.” I heard the same intonation in his voice that I heard in mine when I was clenching my jaw. The words were whistly, like a half-formed hiss.

He did not move. 

“How much of a child is shaped by blood, and how much of it is shaped by their other mother?” 

The words came from somewhere within my brain that some instinct must have been shutting off. I immediately regretted the question.

Kevin's pupils jerkily contracted and dilated. A sharp exhale, tiny tremors, as if he were extremely tense. I hated him for it. I hated how his muscles seemed to swim beneath his skin. I hated his nature and all that he was. He didn’t settle down before answering, as he had before.

“Good. You will find out.”

He stood up, more like he jumped out of his seat, and I immediately followed. Faster than I would expect of myself. He extended his hand, slowly at first and extremely quickly afterwards. 

“You are now complete.”

I took his hand and felt my bones compress. His nails were slightly digging into my skin. I responded in kind by digging mine into his.

We looked at each other for a long time, our hands still clasped, and at some point we were pulled apart. I moved towards the door, still facing Kevin. I knew turning my back would have been wrong somehow. He stood perfectly still, gaze piercing through me. I finally came to the doorway and had to turn my back to him to open it. I felt naked with my back turned towards him. As quickly as I could manage, I unlocked the door and closed it behind me. Images of him with a grotesque, but blank, expression, looking at my back, were floating through my mind.

The moment I was firmly outside room 108, I heard a grime-covered, wet thud from inside. I knew with stomach-churning certainty that the room was entirely unoccupied now and that I would never see Kevin again. No mistakes had been made throughout it all.    

I realized I was holding my breath, then exhaled deeply. The workstation I passed by on my way here was now turned on. I knew it was mine now. I sat down.

The moment I hovered my hand over the mouse, I received a notification from an app I now know was Slack. I opened it. It brought up a text that was titled “Items to Be Procured” in all caps. It was formatted like a shopping list. The items were as follows: 6 jumbo-size eggs, 2 pounds of all-purpose wheat flour, a large packet of granulated sugar, medical scrubs, 2 bars of chocolate, a sterilized scalpel set, anesthetics, 9 rolls of paper towels, and 2 sticks of butter.

He was quite close to starving. But that fact did not cause him much inner trouble. He had experienced this before. In fact, it was the natural state of things for him. He trusted that sometime soon he would catch a familiar scent on the wind and follow it to the source. That the source would sustain him.

So he marched forward. There was not much else to do anyway. Nowhere to go in particular. He walked only so that he could increase the likelihood of encountering a breeze. He did not consciously know of this, of course. It was more of an instinct ingrained within him.

Nevertheless, time and again it yielded favorable results for him, so he did not consider changing it. What could he have changed anyway? What could be gained from being stationary?

He had a strange gait, like the sideways crawling of a snake. He dragged his feet over the sand one after the other instead of taking discrete steps. It worked well for him. He learned that it kept his feet from sinking while also keeping them from getting burned.

Almost everything he knew was either self-taught or instinct. Because, as far as he knew, he was the only being on this endless desert, and he had never encountered someone else from whom he could learn. He did not have the concept of a human being, only the vague sense of self his environment allowed.

As expected, a feeble breeze brushed past him. He masterfully began tracking the scent with renewed vigor, a trait unique to famished animals. He had done this countless times; he could picture the scene waiting for him with uncanny accuracy. The scent he followed would most likely have produced reactions that contrasted sharply with his own if another were to smell it. But he did not know this. To him, it was life, the only thing he knew.

Soon, the featureless expanse was broken by his prize. He approached it sprinting, his unique gait forgotten due to excitement. He hurriedly knelt before it and began shoveling what he could grab into his cotton-dry mouth.

Although it must have been stranded under the sun for some time, it hadn’t been baked into salt and crust. It must have been relatively fresh, despite what the visual condition might have suggested.

The succulent morsels of flesh ruptured inside his mouth and coated his taste buds. This was an experience he found supremely pleasurable.

He was feeding on the carcass of another organism. An organism that he had never seen alive, yet knew intimately well due to these carcasses being the only source of food for him. The first time he encountered one, he knew it was meant for him to consume it.

Although he had no knowledge of formal biology, he knew from simple observation that these beings were different from himself. It was also not lost on him that the carcass and he had similarities in places.

The body was much larger than his own, and the shape was much more elongated. The number of limbs also didn’t seem to match up with his own, yet the dead organism did have limbs. The creature did not have fingers, at least at first glance. Sometimes the eyes of the creature would still be fresh, which he particularly enjoyed eating. The shape and feel of the eyes were similar to his own, although much bigger. The number was also the same between him and his food. The head was not as distinct on the creature as it was on him. The creature had no discernible neck, and the head seemed to be seamlessly fused to the rest of the body. The flesh was much thicker and firmer than his own. If he hadn’t seen the inside of the creature's body, he would have thought that it didn’t have any bones at all. He had no idea what the bones and organs he saw were, since he had no point of reference. All he knew was that the bones were hard and inedible, and that he must have something similar inside his own body, for he could feel angular, hard points beneath his skin anywhere he touched. The organs, he mostly consumed on sight and had no time for inferences, but he knew that the creature had distinct organs that looked different from each other. He fed until he felt it was enough.

He didn’t take the crusted, black-and-red-stained rags he wore off before he crawled into the abdominal cavity of the dead creature. He did this sometimes when the heat was distinctly searing. The inside of the creature provided the only source of shade he could ever get out here.

He felt comforted inside. It was noticeably cooler without fail. Sometimes he would sleep inside the carcasses. Sometimes he would hear and smell, or maybe imagine, smells and sounds he never knew. He would invariably wake up when the sand and sun had penetrated his refuge. The pleasant sensations would be gone when he woke up. Then, he would start walking again. Go hungry again. Starve again. And find a new carcass again. This was practically all he ever did. He knew, almost reflexively, that this pattern would work.

He rested within the carcass, possibly passed out from exhaustion, until the carcass had truly rotted and flaked in the desert wind. He woke up, not caring that his garments were slick with viscera, and started walking.

This was a weird desert, because even though the deserts we know of are barren, they still house numerous animals and plants, while this one had no indication of life at all. The only signs other than him connected to life were the carcasses, which, ironically, were always dead. When he was sated and the sun wasn’t beating down on him, he thought about this. Even though the norm for him was the absence of life, he wondered why he alone was alive. Even he knew the difference between life and death, and wondered why he might have been special. He did not enjoy the walk; the contrast between feeding and walking was too stark for him, and he found it displeasurable. He disliked that the overwhelming majority of his life was spent walking.

But soon, as hunger approached, these thoughts would dissipate like morning mist. He wouldn’t remember that he ever thought more than the pattern he followed.

Hunger came, but for some reason, the thoughts wouldn’t subside. Something was different now. He felt that something about the desert had changed, though he didn’t know why. He stopped walking after much deliberation and just looked around. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he hoped to see something intriguing.

His first instinct was to scan the horizon for any abnormalities. The dunes looked as they had always looked. The cloudless sky was the same shade of blinding, mind-numbing blue. There was nothing to hear as well, save for his own labored breathing. His own sounds were obstructing him from listening to his surroundings. He was getting paranoid; he could have sworn he was also hearing a second sound beneath his own. Impossibly shrill and deep at the same time. All of what he was feeling was new to him, and he was unprepared. With the survivalist instincts of an experienced animal he calmed himself down as much as he could. He was surprised this didn’t result in his fully returning to his old self.

After he settled down, everything looked just as they looked all the time, to his dismay. Something was different when everything appeared the same. This was the first time he felt a primal suggestion of unease, a feeling that might be called fear by those who have the language for it.

There was nothing he could do, so he resumed his walk. The starvation set in after some time; he measured time by starvation cycles, as the sun never set in this desert. He kept walking, and soon enough, as usual, a smell on the breeze greeted him.

However, this time, he could tell the smell was near imperceptibly different; richer, sharper. Maybe this smell was what he knew deep within was always coming. He started tracking the smell immediately, his taste buds coming back to life. He closed in on the smell as it began to sting inside his very tiny nostrils.

He was climbing a dune with a slight incline. His impeccable sense of smell led him to believe that what he was seeking must be extremely close. So close that once he climbed to the top of this dune and the horizon lay unobstructed, he was sure to see his prize.

He was right. Well, not precisely. But what he was seeking was now surely in view. His comprehension was lagging behind his senses. He thought that he had come across an entirely different stretch of the desert, one with dunes that seemingly moved, disappeared, and appeared at the same time. The sand of this peculiar part of the desert was also much more reflective than the sand he was used to. It irregularly shined on his eyes.

But of course, the most striking part of this expanse was that it was a color not unlike the sky he was used to, only a much, much deeper shade. He could see spots of even darker shades, their shapes undefined and ever-changing, the spots ever-moving.

The smell he had been tracking was certainly coming from somewhere within this brand-new desert. In the meantime, while he was not consciously aware of it, he was also smelling the familiar scent of the carcasses. But the smell of the desert was so overwhelming for him that he did not take notice.

He carefully slid down the dune he stood atop, in his peculiar serpentine manner, and slowly approached the boundary between the two deserts, meek as a toddler. He was afraid to cross the boundary, as all animals inherently are when confronted with things of this nature.

Without warning, the smell of the carcasses snapped out of existence as if they had never been present at all. Now that the smell was gone, he was immediately aware of the difference. Panicked, he turned to face the desert he knew, intending to search for the carcasses. What he at once noticed was something on the horizon. A verticality, a black shape that stood out. It was too far away to make out its contours exactly.

Something in the back of his head, around the point where his neck vertebrae joined his skull, told him to be very afraid of this new intruder. That it was the reason he couldn’t smell the carcasses anymore.

Logically, he ran away from the shape as fast as he could. Stealing glances at it as he ran. The shape always appeared to be as far away as it was when he first saw it.

After running for a couple of hours, he stopped. He truly couldn’t smell any new carcasses, even though he must have run for miles, and he was about to pass out from starvation and possibly die. Maybe there were no more carcasses around to smell.

The only course of action that was left for him was to cross over into the other desert. If he were lucky, the shape wouldn’t follow him there.

He approached the undulating, rhythmically shifting boundary of the two worlds and stepped on the oddly colored sand. The sand was entirely different than what he had expected. Cool to the touch, and most importantly, he couldn’t stand on it. His feet just passed through it to finally settle on the sand he knew, that was beneath the new sand.

He took more steps, and the new sand kept rising. It was now up to his chest, and he found it extremely hard to move through this new material. He pushed himself further, and the sand was now up to his neck, occasionally lapping at his sunburnt chin. He knew now he couldn’t walk any further, but looking back, the verticality was still visible, taunting him.