Of course, you must understand, I couldn't be bothered to act. I know weepers still pretend to try, but I wasn't a weeper, at least not then.
It isn't even dangerous, the teeth only sharp to its target. But it would not have been right, you know? That's the way things are now. You ignore the screams. You put on a podcast: two guys talking, two guys who are slightly cleverer than you but not too clever, who talk in such a way as to make you feel you're not some pathetic voyeur consuming a pornography of friendship but rather part of a trio, a silent co-host who hasn't been in the mood to contribute for the past 500 episodes. But some day you're gonna say something clever, clever but not too clever.
And that's what I did. I put on one of my two-guys-talking podcasts. I have dozens of them. I don't even remember the name or even what they were talking about. That's not the point. That's not the point at all. They might not even be human. It might be two of them pretending to be two guys talking. I have met many people with impossibly strange jobs, but never have I met a podcaster.
2x speed then to 3x as it was a really bad day, I tried not to think about what I was watching even as I watched, tried not to think about the origami man. Admit it. You're the same as I was, aren't you? When you're working your shift or in the subway or walking your designated companion animal and a man unfolds, when you see its strange, impossible innards - that great maw in its chest - you don't stand in front of the thing yelling, "Women and children behind me. I will sate its terrible hunger in your stead." This may be a kind of Titanic but none of us are gentlemen anymore. And that's not even how the origami men work anyway, is it? They're only hungry for whomever they're hungry for in that particular place, at that particular time.
What you do is you freeze. You do not run. You know what happens when someone tries to run. So you freeze and wait and hope. And when you're clear, when you're sure you're not on the menu today, what do you do then, I wonder? You watch them too, don't you? You see and don't see it even while you're seeing, as I did.
They say they're machines made out of other machines? Can you imagine that? Machines made out of machines, little tiny ones, smaller even than our cells are. Little bits of clockwork all summing up to an origami man. Gears so small even with a microscope you can't see them. That's all there is to them. Gears, gears, gears all the way down, and when it unfolds into that strange maw (that eerie undulating vortex of hunger) what it is, is a machine made of machines just like humans are. But we're not gears are we? We're not gears all the way down.
No. I wasn't curious. I am long past curious. I have seen this too many times to be curious. I just watched like I always watch (the two guys yapping at 3x in my ear) as a young man who looked to me almost angelic was, hmm, how do we even describe it? "Absorbed" doesn't properly convey the full horror. "Eaten" doesn't capture the weird, almost antiseptic nature of the consumption. Not a drop of blood escaping the maw. Nothing remained after the thing folded itself back into a human shape, now grotesquely obese. Nothing remained as it nodded its head, smiled at me blandly, and walked away.
"Creeps me out," the woman next to me said, her eyes cold, her smile sharp as if of broken glass. "It will split in two. That's how they reproduce, I heard."
"That's what they say. That's what they say. But I don't think it's true," I replied.
"You know what happens when you try to follow one?" she asked, but it wasn't really a question. We all know what happens. This small talk more of a ritual, more of a ritual than anything. A ritual of relief. A ritual of confusion. A ritual, too, of apathy and helplessness. You know how things are now. You know how things have been since whatever happened happened. Since we all woke up in this shared nightmare.
At the unfactory, I disassemble cars fresh from the assembly line of our only customer, to whom we are the sole source of parts. I try not to think about the pointlessness. But sometimes I want to scream. Do you ever feel like screaming? While you're counting bricks or sorting papers or sharpening nails or slaughtering rubber cows, do you ever feel like screaming and running and just giving up and jumping off a bridge or even following an origami man to wherever origami men go? Does this feel like how life ought to be? I have almost forgotten, maybe. I have almost forgotten what it was like before but I remember a world that made some sense sometimes. I remember trees without those bizarre black leaves, leaves which tracked the sun rather than the people walking by. I remember a different sky, a sky that was perfect, peaceful and blue. And you remember it too. Never forget that you remember. Think of it now. Think of it now and tell me it doesn't make you want to weep.
And maybe you don't feel like screaming, but I felt like screaming, felt like screaming as I was walking my designated companion animal after my shift - that wretched thing I both despise and love, its weird teddy-bear smile, its placid expression. The strange, intelligent coldness in its forelimbs. So expressive are its forelimbs. I was walking it, walking it as we all must walk our designated companion animals, to prevent the nocturnal howling. I let it off its leash and it skittered up one of those awful trees, skittered up and did whatever it is it does there. Possibly it ate something stranger even than itself. And I felt it rise in me, that scream in my throat. I felt it rise and I did not suppress, could not suppress it then.
"Alex?" I heard a woman's voice say, "Are you alright?"
"No," I said.
It was Jamie. She was walking her designated companion animal too, a strange feathered half-insect gamboling about on two chitinous legs. Jamie, whom I had known before the sky changed. Jamie, who saw the whole of me and did not balk even before we found ourselves in this impossible forest-city, before the origami men. Jamie, she looked at me with grace, a large soul embracing a minuscule one in just a single, compassionate glance. My brother's widow. My best friend. She is not broken. She is not like us. There is nothing, I think, which could break her.
"I can't take it. I just can't fucking take it."
"You need to talk to Shaman Bob," she said.
Shaman Bob must have offended their sensibilities because he is given piecework and a quota that keeps him busy at all times. He is a knife duller, seeming truly happy as he grabbed sharpened steel from one impossibly-large pile, scraped it to spec (with a well-worn brick he treated like a beloved infant) and then, in one fluid motion, threw it into another pile, his work sublimated into an unconscious dance he maintained while in conversation that some might describe as having elements of lucidity. We talked in his bottom-floor tenement apartment, my designated companion animal tethered outside that vast crooked tower, that writhing habitat.
"Why are you here? What is your Reason?" he said, sweat wicking down his Van Dyke and coalescing into a large drop.
Jamie warned me about him, said he does not use words as others do. His strange emphasis reflecting either higher meanings or insanity, betraying something inhuman about him, she said; but not the cold, feckless inhumanity of our new world. "A more humane inhumanity," were the words she used.
I told him about how Jamie found me, found me standing in that dark forest, shrieking as a child might, a leash dangling from my left hand, the impossible trees looking almost fascinated, their leaves twitching like so many ears, vulpine and cruel.
"That is a story," he said, "but not a Reason. Do you Understand?"
He looked at me, assessing. "Of course you do not Understand. You do not even understand. How could you Understand without first understanding?"
I must have looked at him with complete confusion because he said, "Do not worry about that for now. Tell me all of what happened before your crisis."
I told him about the angel who was taken, that man I saw who was beautiful even as he died. I told him about the origami man. And the podcasts I use to drown my thoughts and about how I feel nothing so much of the time. I told him about the old sky. How I dream about it. I told him about Jamie, who is as an anchor to me now. I told him about my half-love for my designated companion animal. I told him how, sometimes, when it moves its forelimbs just so, I think it, too, is lost in the world. It, too, finds itself wondering why things are as they are.
"Have you ever been a weeper?" he asked.
"A weeper? I haven't seen a weeper in years," I said.
"That is not what I ask. I ask: have you ever been a weeper?"
I never once tried to stop an origami man. I never once threw myself uselessly against one or begged or cried or fought or bargained. I had never shoved my hand into its maw and tried to pull out an innocent, never felt the odd bristle weepers describe from the impossibly small teeth rejecting their flesh. I had laughed at weepers. I had felt pity for them. But even on that first day, that first incomprehensible day when normality had not yet cast its quotidian magic, even then I only ever gawked.
"No," I said, and I felt a sort of shame.
"Then you must become one, at least once. Do that. And then Return."
I stood at the door-removal station, working a bolt loose with Gary, a slow parade of 1993 Honda Accords making their way down the disassembly line. Gary is my ratchet and towards him I feel an unreserved affection that is in stark contrast to that half-love for my designated companion animal. Gary has been a faithful friend in these many years disassembling 1993 Honda Accords, his cold exterior and precision, I daydreamed once, camouflaging a gentler, jesting nature known only to myself.
1993 Honda Accords, always 1993 Honda Accords. Strange boxy cars I barely remember from my youth, every one that same golf-ball white, just on the verge of yellow. As I worked, I listened to one of my two-guys-talking podcasts and every hour or so my manager, Martin, came by to chastise me for doing so, this sort of chastisement his entire purpose here which has always seemed to me a worse part in this play, even, than unmaking Honda Accords. So I am always nice to him about it, and I apologize and wait until he's out of view before I put my earbuds back in. And he doesn't care about it any more than I care about unmaking Accords. He is like me. He is like you, his eyes betraying that same weariness and learned helplessness that all of us have, all of us save for Jamie, Jamie and Shaman Bob.
All my days were like this, both before and after my crisis. But now I had a purpose. Now I was to be a weeper. But to be a weeper I would need an origami man, and that is just a matter of waiting. And so I worked and waited and drowned my thoughts in inane, high-speed blather and talked to Jamie and walked my companion animal and rode the subway. Waiting, waiting, waiting for some innocent to die. So I could what? So I could achieve some catharsis? So I could amuse Shaman Bob? I didn't really know. But it was something, something that felt vaguely real, and that something was so far from nothing, so, so far from nothing at all.
And after my shift that day, that day so like all the others, I walked through our forest city, walked past feeding stations and so many tenements, taking my usual route to the subway. I noticed a circle of frozen people surrounding a woman of about thirty, a woman of about thirty and an origami man.
She wore a yellow dress. She was ugly in a way that was sort of beautiful. Her features alien and cold and yet so human, so completely and utterly human, eyes filled with fear and a sort of longing I can't articulate. And I was readying myself to gawk, my hands reaching for my earbuds. And then I caught myself, thought of Shaman Bob's orders. And with all the effort I had within me, I forced myself to feel.
I don't fully understand what happened. I felt nothing at first.
A vision of a young me walking on a marble floor on which was strewn high-tech surgical equipment, incomprehensibly powerful instruments left lying for any precocious child to pick up. I felt empathy not for this woman but for myself. I had done a sort of violence to myself, I realized. With tools so sharp I could not even feel it, I had severed mental wires. I had butchered myself before I was even me. I had betrayed myself in a manner that seemed almost unforgivable, and it happened even before, even before the world changed. And tears came. My vision blurred. The pain. So much pain.
And then this strange empathy let go of myself and grasped on to her, that maw sucking her inwards, ciliary whiskers, trillions of little vise-grip teeth pulling, always pulling. And I ran into the circle, ran through that mass of inhumanity, ran towards that horrid, man-shaped thing and punched and I cried and I spat. And I shoved my hands into its maw, pulled at the woman's arm with a sort of desperation bordering on madness and whispered lamentations and apologies and comforts and I looked in her eyes and then I looked away in shame and then I looked back again and said, "I am sorry. I am so very sorry." The maw enclosing us both now, then pushing me out, pushing me out like an amoeba does some mote of dust not to its taste. And I found myself screaming again, screaming but not as a child screams, not as a child anymore, screaming with a sort of pure rage at that bland, obese thing the maw transformed into, at its placid smile, at its dead eyes.
I was a weeper now. And I wasn't sure what it meant. But Shaman Bob knew. Of that I was sure.
"What was the point! It's so much worse now," I shouted at Shaman Bob. I was back in his apartment, his designated companion animal, a mole/spider hybrid, crawling up my left calf.
"Do not claim," Shaman Bob said, "to regret what you do not regret. It is Childish."
"I can't do this. I can't do this every time. I can't."
"You do not have to," Bob said, dulling a knife as he did so. "But you needed to Try."
And I asked him, asked how this could possibly help, given I am still stuck in this place. I am still forced to work at the unfactory. I still witness horrors, never-ending horrors. I still long for the old world. I still long for that old sky. And at least before I had the numbness. At least before I had the nothing-at-all. And I told him how I didn't even feel like screaming anymore. I just wanted to cry. And I told him I didn't even know what else I should want. Why should we even want anything at all?
And here, for the first time in our acquaintance, he paused in his labour.
"You dream of the old sky," he said. "But dream of the Stars. There are those who would change their Stars. Even those who guess at the Stars of our captors and pretend themselves directed by them. And maybe some succeed in this abnegation." He stroked his Van Dyke. "Do not meditate long on such creatures. You can't change your Stars and still be Human. They can be stolen from you or given away or sold for the smallest sum. But you are always You while they guide you."
"There is no escape here, I think. There is no winning this game. The only peace I can offer You in this not-quite-hell lives in Your Stars. Do you understand?"
I cannot say I did understand. I cannot say I did not understand.
At a feeding station table we sat, those vast troughs of goulash, that queue which always feels a lifetime and a wasted one at that - and in our hands our tin cups, tin cups stamped, for whatever reason, with the Pepsi Cola logo but filled with Purple Nutrition Supplement #5.
Jamie ate, glancing at me with concern. I was not finishing my goulash lately. I was getting thin. In a sea of broken people, I was starting to stand out. People go mad here. Sometimes violent. And we learn to keep our distance, don't we? Keep our distance from those who are just about to break, lest it be the sort of thing that spreads; and, of course, it often is.
"Shaman Bob isn't helping?" she asked.
I told her about the woman. I told her about becoming a weeper. I told her how feeling things is maybe worse, maybe worse even than the nothing-at-all.
"Henry was so worried about you. Before."
She never talked about Henry. Neither of us did. A wound that cauterized two hearts together. He was a sort of negative space that defined our friendship. He was a sort of no-go zone.
"You admired him so much. You were so jealous of his genius. You wanted to be him. I think he was worried he was preventing you from becoming yourself."
"What does it matter now? You sound like Shaman Bob."
"It matters because you're my best friend. It matters because you can't keep not eating. It matters because if you don't matter then I don't either," is what she said.
She needed me. That was a sort of something, wasn't it? And the sort of something that is better, maybe, better than the nothing-at-all. And this thought made me start eating my ghoulish goulash and drinking that sickly grape milkshake. And she smiled.
"You hear there was another follower?" she said. "Some guy at the plastic fruit orchard."
"Was there contagion?" I asked.
"Not this time. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it?"
She often had these theories, theories about the followers. She was fascinated by them. She thought they were a sort of key, the key to everything. And the key to the key, in her reckoning, was contagion. And it is mysterious, isn't it? How a follower is never harmed at first. How whatever happens there happens and they return. And then sometime the next day, and usually in public view, they are consumed as the angelic man was, as the woman I wept for was. And sometimes, but only sometimes, there is contagion. People they know are taken too.
"They must learn something. Something important," she said. "I am sure of it. And contagion is what happens if they share what they learned."
For months I lived like this, a now-raw soul rubbing against a world of broken glass. But I spent time with Jamie and talked to Shaman Bob when it all seemed too much. I survived, as we have all survived. We had each other. And like I said, that was something. But she would look at me sometimes, look at me with an expression I didn't understand, but now do. It was guilt. She was wracked with it. She was planning to betray me. She couldn't help herself. Even for me, she couldn't help herself. She was planning to become a follower. She was planning to die. Not because she wanted to. But because, I think, she felt it was worth it, worth it to understand if only for a day.
It happened as we were walking our designated companion animals. She was not quite herself that night. I noticed but did not notice. And then I saw movement. So fast. So inhumanly fast. An origami man was holding her arm.
I will never forget her expression. She was worried. Not for herself but for me.
"I had to know," she said, thick tears flowing now, "I am so sorry. I couldn't stop thinking about why. Why? I tried so hard but I couldn't not know."
"I love you," she said, "I love you so much."
And I wanted to be angry. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to scream at the selfishness. I wanted to feel and think a lot of things that were not what I thought and I felt. What I thought was, what I felt was, maybe there is a way to weep without weeping. Maybe there is a way to honor her and myself at the same time. And maybe that is how an Adult acts in our circumstances. And maybe that's a part of what Shaman Bob had been trying to hammer into my thick skull. And so I held her hand as it happened and I told her those things I have always forgotten to say. I told her she was as much my sister as her husband was my brother. I told her I loved her, loved her even more than I loved Gary. And she almost laughed, if you would believe it, almost laughed when I said that. And I told her I will never forget. That I will remember her as long as I remember the sky.
And as her hand dissolved, that last bit of her disappearing even as it was grasped in my own, I cried. Cried, but did not weep.
"Jamie is gone," I said to Shaman Bob. I had brought my designated companion animal inside his apartment this time. And it and his mole/spider eyed each other warily before retreating to opposite sides of the apartment.
"She often spoke to me of the followers," Shaman Bob said. "I always considered this a possibility."
"Do you think she-" I said, interrupting myself. "I don't know quite what I want to ask."
"What you want to ask," Shaman Bob said, "is, was she following her Stars or was she extinguishing them? What you want to ask for, I think, is my blessing to become a follower too."
"Yes," I said.
"You were not Human when I met you. You were not even a Child. You could not even see the Path, let alone walk it. You did not Understand." He spent a minute focusing on dulling knives, spent a minute tending with greater care than ever to his beloved brick, feeding it its milk of knife edges. "Why do you think she did it? Do you think she wanted to die?"
"No. She needed to know why. She thought 'why' was worth dying for."
"I have lost so many friends. Including her. And soon I will lose another," he said, a tear rolling down his cheek, settling into his beard. "You will go no matter what I say."
"Yes," I said.
It didn't take long to find an origami man, not far from my usual feeding station, not many weeks after my last words to Bob. I watched this time, as it consumed an old man. I did not hold his hand or speak to him or comfort him. But I witnessed. And I wept without weeping, as Bob taught me. And then I followed, my designated companion animal running behind me unleashed, what I could almost imagine being concern in its chittering forelimbs.
For hours we walked past row after row of seething tenements, past factories and unfactories and those awful feeding stations, every one an exact copy of the other. The trees, the horrible trees got thicker and thicker, thicker and thicker as we reached the edge of our forest city, as we neared the threshold, that three-meter wide circle surrounding the city where no tree grows, where nothing grows at all. There would be no going back once I crossed it. This was my final chance of changing my mind.
It felt like nothing, as I crossed it. It felt like every other step before. I had condemned myself the night Jamie died. This was no Rubicon to me. This was just another clump of dirt.
So thick was the forest now, those fox-eared trees swaying towards me as I walked. They wanted to grasp me. They wanted to smother me in their curiosity, but something repelled them in that final inch, and nothing in our strange forest even traced across my skin.
After hours we came to a clearing. And there I saw the end of the sky.
At first I thought we were in a sort of dome. At first I thought that but I don't think that now. A bubble, I think. And maybe you agree. A bubble or a tumor or corpuscle. As strange and awful as it is in here, I think it is an oasis of normality compared to what's outside.
The origami man stood beside the end of the sky, his hand sinking into it, as if he was becoming part of it.
"Wait!" I yelled.
He turned to me and looked. That rotund, almost comical form, those dead, alien eyes.
"It talks to us," it said, the tone almost reverent, the words felt rehearsed, ceremonial.
"What have you done with earth? What have you done with the sky? Why did you conquer us, to what end?" I asked these things, these first questions that came to my mind.
"It has questions for us. We will honor its questions," it said. "We did not conquer mankind. We purchased you from that-which-claimed-you."
"You purchased us? From who?" I said.
"From that-which-claimed-you."
"But why the impossible sky and the trees that make me want to vomit? Why the factory and the unfactory? Why?"
"Your life is as it is because you have provenance and can be made to embody," and it whispered this part almost reverently, "that-which-is-beautiful-to-us."
It seemed to think the conversation over or the ritual complete.
"It already knows what will happen if it speaks of this. We will reap it tomorrow," it said.
I do not know why I write this. I do not know why I write this thing I plan to place past that threshold, in that path the origami man took when I followed, to be read only by those who can read it safely, to be read only by the doomed. I write not to whoever finds this, which may well be no one, which may well be an origami man. I write to another who has condemned themselves to die. And I write not to you as I imagine you will be when you read this. I write to you as you are now.
I love you even though I don't know you. I love you even though it feels like rubbing my soul against broken glass.
And I like to think you'll be there tomorrow, on the train or walking your companion animal or wherever it is that it finds me. I like to think you'll be watching while not watching.
I won't scream or cry or freeze or do any of the things people usually do. I will try to enjoy my final tomorrow. And, though I do not know if it is possible, though I do not know if this small rebellion will be, itself, part of their show, I will try, also, to not be beautiful to them. And maybe, watching me, you will learn something about how to not be beautiful too.
