Anomie.05

Characters/Origins/Spoilers: Bel (Year Zero/The Alters)

Local Network World: 0333

“Sit.”

“Fuck you.” Bel wasn’t sure if she was biting back at the lack of options - It sat, alone, in the middle of the narrow, maroon, velvet couch with the idiotically baroque carved-wood frame in the middle of the inky void - or just general antipathetic resistance. It flicked Its wrist. A long couch - faux-leather, taller at one end - materialised against a wall with several large, frosted glass, arch-topped window panes embedded in it. The newly manifested room was a warm, muted cream colour, wall-by-wall. There was no apparent exit, just…walls, windows - that, notably, looked out onto blank daylit nothing - and two very stylistically dissonant couches. “Cliche aye-eff.” Bel muttered.

“Sit.” Bel sat awkwardly against the taller-backed side of the couch beneath the windows. “Good. Now.” Its features shifted. It was…stably, generically woman-shaped, now, rather than specifically Kade-shaped. Older. It was…nondescript. Wearing a sensible little beige blazer over a fuschia blouse, with a flowy pair of cream slacks and matching flats.

“Ugly outfit.” Bel chided.

“Well, blame yourself for not remembering her wearing something nicer.” ‘Ms Hart’ shrugged.

“Oh god.” Bel sighed, hit with sudden realisation: “You’re cosplaying my first psychiatrist? From when I was fucking nine?”

“Oh please, like your broken little brain can put a solid date-range on any memory from before age seventeen. Even after that…” It chuckled. “Chronological mapping like Swiss cheese, you.”

“I remember enough to remember how well this didn’t go.” Bel observed. “Not that I’m against therapy, but something about psychiatrists in specific feels…adversarial.”

“I’m not actually a psychiatrist, Bel.” ‘Ms Hart’ disclosed patiently, letting the words out slowly, like It was talking to a child. Or an idiot.

“Oh yeah? Then why’re you wearing one?”

“Because it’s funny?”

“Yeah. Hilarious.” Bel drawled.

“Anyway, it only needs to be as adversarial as you make it. Think of it as just…trauma-informed talk therapy - ”

“ - With an eldritch abomination?” Bel raised an eyebrow.

“I’d read it.” ‘Ms Hart’ shrugged. “You’d write it.”

“What do you want? Like actually, what do you want with me?”

“Some honesty, mainly? It’s…abstract. Something in the realm of ‘closure’? I suspect we won’t entirely know until we get there.” ‘Ms Hart’ held Its hands up, manifesting a black, Moleskine notebook in one - Bel rolled her eyes so hard she was momentarily concerned she might dislocate a cornea - and a silver fountain pen in the other. “Shall we begin?” It asked.

“Yeah. Fine. Whatever.” Bel shook her head, staring off into the middle distance.

“So.” ‘Ms Hart’ settled back into the couch. A tan and white pashmina materialised around her shoulders.

“Oh for the love of fucking god…” Bel muttered.

“How are you enjoying the end of your world?” ‘Ms Hart’ asked. Bel took a moment to bite back several obvious, immediately available rejoinders…remembering the terms of their agreement had implied engagement.

“It makes me embarrassed for you.” She settled on. “You clearly think it’s horrifying, but it’s…thematically confused, what with the…pseudo-Christian imagery, the clumsily integrated sci-fi mechanisms, the…I dunno what you’d call them, the…Jungian referential flotsam and jetsam?”

“Oh, interesting. So you know what the crosses are, then?” ‘Ms Hart’ queried.

“Yeah, like…a thinly veiled metaphor for erasure-in-plain-sight? It’s like you have…horror ADHD. Commit to a fucking frame, y’know?” Bel sat back into the couch, folding one leg over the other, crossing her arms over her chest and avoiding eye contact.

“Int…er…est…ing…” ‘Ms Hart’ muttered, scribbling in Its notebook. “And we’re not seeing any parallels there, with your own work?”

“You think that’s what I do?” She asked, raising an eyebrow, looking back at ‘Ms Hart’, noting the brief, amused smile that response earned.

“You tell me.”

“I mean, to the extent that my writing is an expression of my interiority, yes, there’s some…disorganised inclusions, but I like to think my work is cohesive at a high level in the sense of…the figuratives serving the plot?”

“Hmm. So you’re deliberately - ”

“ - Well no, ‘deliberate’ isn’t a word I would use to describe my process.” Bel cut It off, a little more defensively than she’d intended. “I do tend to write towards a goal in the sense that I have particular beats I want to hit, but yeah, those are waypoints. The rest is largely spontaneous. I let the characters talk, walk through the world, and I build those elements out on the fly. That’s…valid, right?”

“Is it? Or is it…thematically confused?” ‘Ms Hart’ asked. Bel frowned.

“The difference is, the thematics of my work build out from the structure. This shit you’re doing seems to be putting the cart ahead of the horse. A grab-bag of thematic elements thrown together, and then characters thrown into that.”

“Ahh. It sounds like you’re not a fan of genre-writing.” ‘Ms Hart’ nodded. Bel cocked her head to the side. She briefly wondered if pissing her off was…incidental, or an actual secondary goal, or perhaps the entire point.

“That’s not what genre-writing is.” She replied, affect-absent.

“How is it not? Let’s delve deeper into that. What do you think genre-writing is?”

“Um…parameters? Bounded aesthetic affectation? A thematic palette that defines the…vibe?”

“Right, so your critique would be that my apocalypse doesn’t have cohesive ‘vibe’. That it’s confused. As opposed to your vibes, which are ‘genre’.”

“I didn’t say that.” Bel hedged, feeling distinctly like she was being walked into a bind. “I’m not saying my work adheres heavily to genre, I’m saying I define a thematic palette that I like for the beats I want to hit, which may or may not intersect with, or subvert genre, whereas your work is just…doing random crap in an attempt to be fucking upsetting, which makes you…hacky and annoying.”

“To what extent…” ‘Ms Hart’ murmured, writing more notes, “Do we think it’s much of a muchness?”

“Elaborate?” Bel sighed. Her lips tightened into a thin little scowl and she found her foot tapping against carpet as she watched ‘Ms Hart’ feign ambivalence into her notepad.

“Okay, hypothesis: your work is armchair psychological excavation. The thematics are psychological detritus, disorganised by design, purposed towards rendering an abstraction of self designed to demonstrate a gestalt via interlinked fragmentation. You follow?”

“I do. You’re saying you think I write a shattered version of me, framed with plot and continuity, to understand the sum of my parts better than I can by just observing the whole.”

“And what are your thoughts on that?”

“Partially true. Reductive, though. I do…simply enjoy writing. It’s passion more than it’s self-analysis. The self-analysis is, I think, a pretty natural tendency of writers who have a certain kind of…internal architecture - ”

“ - Could you define that archetype of ‘internal architecture’? In your estimation, of course?” ‘Ms Hart’ asked, words dripping with what Bel suspected It knew very well were a transparent pantomime of ‘innocence’. She sighed.

“Broken. Traumatised. Mentally unwell.”

“Do we think that might be reductive?” ‘Ms Hart’ queried. Bel felt the left edge of her lip rise involuntarily, exposing teeth. She shook her head.

“We think it’s true.”

“Of you, certainly.” Bel inhaled sharply, as a sort of muted protest about ‘Ms Hart’’s implication. “But you’re placing yourself in the company of, presumably, a lot of other authors who self-analyse through their work. I’d be interested to hear some examples of other authors who you’d consider…‘contemporaries’ of your ‘ouvre’ who are equally…self-indulgent - “

“ - Hey! - ”

“ - Simplex - ”

“ - Oh fuck you - ”

“ - Uninspiredly gearing their narrative cartography towards the most obvious possible depiction of an authorial self in crisis...”

“That’s hardly the point of my work.” Bel muttered. She could hear her voice. Didn’t like it. Something about the cadence registered as ‘bratty’. This bothered her.

“So let’s dig into that. What is the point of your work? Why is every character in Year Zero…more or less you?” Bel shifted uncomfortably on the couch as she felt ‘Ms Hart’ begin tracing the cluster of nerves It had clearly been intentionally circling. Metaphors started swimming to the surface. Of tightropes, and halls of mirrors, and blood in shark-infested water. She forced her foot steady against the carpet. “Why are all of your projects, similarly, centred on a mildly abstracted, redirected, portrait of - ”

“ - Because there’s something fucking wrong with me,” Bel cut ‘Ms Hart’ off: “I process through fiction, and I happen to think it turned out kinda cool. Okay? I like my work. I think it’s good. I think it says something worth saying. Humans aren’t that distinct and complicated that my introspection mightn’t have value to other fucked up girls trying to figure themselves out. Especially ones who…I don’t know, experience ‘Self’ as quorum rather than a singular, and really don’t know what to do with that - ”

“ - Or, more accurately, refuse to do anything productive with it - “ Bel bristled, feeling her jaw clench and her bottom row of teeth involuntarily jack-knife against the top:

“ - Art’s productive - ” She ground out.

“ - Even bad art?” ‘Ms Hart’ smiled wanly.

“Even if it is, yes.” Bel forced herself to regulate her breathing. Her heartbeat, she could do qualitatively less about. “And what else is there to be done about it? The way mental health is metabolised by our society is directly relates to incapacity under capitalism; treating people’s worth as directly related to their functional ability, and the value of helping them as inherently tied to augmenting that functional ability. So if I am, in the eyes of capitalism, productive, it relegates my problems to a matter of fucking whimsy, which I have to white-knuckle more-or-less alone, and I do so by writing them. So fucking what, my characters are all…alternate versions of me. Is that a fucking crime? Jesus.”

Bel’s breathing began to return to normal, along with her heartbeat. She felt a momentary sense of…emotional amnesia, as if an overfull white-board had been wiped down between the time she finished talking and now.

“Good.” ‘Ms Hart’ nodded.

“Good?” Bel raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Good. Honesty.”

“Ugh.” Bel rolled her eyes. “I hate this shit. Truly. I haven’t once been dishonest with you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. You do appear to have strategically side-stepped the part where your work doubles as exposure therapy…deliberately integrating content that triggers your RSD for public consumption to inoculate yourself against - ”

“ - For fuck’s sake. This reminds me of the arguments I used to have with that one ex: just because I don’t regurgitate your preferred words, with your preferred framing, doesn’t mean I’m lying. I’m allowed to choose my own fucking words, and things are rarely simple enough that they can be reduced down to a fucking…corporate-mission-statement style thesis.”

“Things are rarely that simple. But this is. You are. Thirty years to invent verbiage to stylise your damage doesn’t alter the root issue of a twelve year old girl screaming out for attention, validation; begging for permission to exist.”

“Pfft.” Bel ‘pfft’’d

“Pfft?” ‘Ms Hart’ raised an eyebrow.

“Fake news. Everyone’s structure is built on a foundation of some sad, needy kid. If that’s me, that’s everyone, so what’s the fucking point in mentioning it? Ubiquity in psychology negates to ‘normalcy’.” Bel smirked. Tried to hide it. Being self-satisfied about a turn of phrase was - she’d learned, through painful and repetitive experiences - not something people tended to just let you have.

“Well setting that obvious bullshit to the side for a second…” Bel rolled her eyes, deliberately enough to ensure ‘Ms Hart’ saw her do it. “Are we claiming we don’t experience our childhood damage as unique and special, Bel? Let’s name it plainly - “

“ - Let’s fucking not.” Bel growled. More instinct than intent, she found herself sitting forward on the couch, hands clamped between her knees.

“Why not? After all this time, why not? You saw something - worse than the worst thing you could imagine - happen to someone you loved, and cherished, and idolised. It broke your psyche. Literally. Shards of recollection, out of place; your ’soap bubbles on the wind’ metaphor - not your best, but adequately legible - your entire history, a pile of images and clips, out of sequence and lossy. And here you are, writing long-form fiction about dozens of iterated variations of ‘you’, extrapolations of what wasn’t, what could have been, what could still be…expressions of multiplicity - ”

“ - I never claimed that - ” The words were almost entirely involuntary, and almost immediately drowned out:

“ - And you seriously expect the assertion that your damage is flatly universal to be remotely believable?” ‘Ms Hart’ left just enough silence between one thought and the next to make Bel feel extremely small for not being able to find anything with which to fill it. “The work intersects utterly. Your damage is load-bearing, and you clearly experience it as, if not unique, adjacent to that.”

“What do you actually want from me, here?” Bel asked.

“I want to know…why you’ve never outright said it.” Another fucking pause. “You’ve given Kade your transition, Olivia your complicated early-transition experiences with trying to find community…you’ve given Alice your academic obsessions and how you wish you could consistently map your relationship with gender, Faith your isolation and desire to be the community you couldn’t find. You’ve given Mic your avoidant tendencies. You’ve given Kira your tendency towards care-via-logistics, Maya the Machiavellian streak you refuse to indulge, Seven your nihilism-tinged absurdism and bitterness, Plethora your multiplicity and your alienation from it. You’ve given Exodus your desire for uncomplicated queer-platonic intimacy, and enough narrative distance to mark it as something you don’t believe is actually possible. You’ve given Anna your damage and your perseverance. You’ve sliced yourself up, and you’ve named all of it in either main text or subtext, and you’ve relegated your core, defining wound to a single, euphemistic abstraction: the ‘home invasion’. Why?” Bel let her head loll to the side as ‘Ms Hart’ finished up Its little list. She didn’t know whether to burst out laughing, or to try to physically attack It…but before she could decide, she found herself sitting forward, lips moving…words coming out:

“Yeah. Sure. Why don’t I take the single most fucked up thing that ever happened to me, fictionalise it, re-live it through describing it, hand it to a version of me who doesn’t deserve it, and put it out there for the world to see? Gee, I have no fucking clue, sounds like a completely chill and not at all fucking terrible idea, you fucking moron.” Bel finished; eyes wide and eyebrows half-way up her forehead, as if to ask: ‘Thoughts? Questions?’

“Bear with me, Bel…” ‘Ms Hart’ adjusted Its pashmina and folded one leg over the other, placing Its notebook down in Its lap and both hands over the notebook: “What you’re doing…what you’ve been doing for awhile, is building disclosure into a pathology, in the sense that you’re fostering circadian rhythms reinforcing the interplay between healing and revealing. Who you are, what you’ve been through…how it feels as much as how it was. So what do you think happens to the things you don’t say? What do you think happens when you refuse the thing that you’ve built into a prerequisite for recovery?”

“I dunno, probably something cool and super-fucking-healthy? You tell me. Clearly you have a fucking opinion on it.”

“Hmm.” ‘Ms Hart’ paused, considering. “Do you think you wrote your books? Year Zero, Dark Skies? Are they…‘yours’, in your estimation?”

“It’s difficult to not see it as chicken and egg.” Bel admitted warily.

“Would it surprise you to learn that…the strangeness of your world - your world specifically, is simply…a result of you being a powered Alter? That your…’friends’ - which is, I’m sure, how you would describe them - are bad, localised photocopies of the real Alters? The ones out there in the multiverse with no clue you even exist, beyond the assumption that…to each Local Network world exists a Local Network alternate self, component of the Multiversal Self? Symptoms of a tear in the fabric of the Multiverse created by Helios’ misbegotten experimentation? Would that, do you think, shake the foundations at all? Rock the boat, as it were?”

“I mean, seems fairly consistent with my ability to take anything remotely intellectually overwrought, and keep shoving it up its own ass until it becomes a set of conceptual Matryoshka Dolls, yeah?”

“Oh, Dadaist deflection…something new and original for you.” ‘Ms Hart’ deadpanned, glancing down Its nose at Bel.

“Say it’s true.” Bel acknowledged: “What do I care?”

“So you’ve thought about it?”

“I’m not stupid. It’s…occurred to me, yeah, that I might be…a processing hub, in a sense?” Bel folded one leg over the other, trying to let herself sink back into the couch. Trying to approximate comfort in the hopes comfort might manifest. “And I know that my friends don’t…parse. All living on my world, their powers present but flattened, like they’re…” Bel inhaled sharply, scowling.

“…Echoes?” ‘Ms Hart’ offered.

“Don’t…do that.” Bel shook her head. “Don’t call them that.”

“As you like.” ‘Ms Hart’ shrugged.

“And the way your apocalypse is so…unobtrusive. The way the supermarkets stay stocked. The power and water and internet staying on. There’s a reason I’m not laughing at the idea of it. I know my world is…wrong.”

“Are you comfortable with it? The…idea of it?”

“What does it honestly change?” Bel shrugged. “Either my world’s a product of me, or I’m a product of it. I think a lot of people feel the ground opening up beneath them over challenges to free will, and questions of the extent to which they’re defined by their environment. I don’t, so much. The concept of the individual self, to me, mostly just…reeks of a lack of perspective. Both in the sense that I think some degree of multiplicity is far more common than diagnosed, pathologised indicators would suggest, and also just…generically, as metaphysics? Like…you zoom out or in any real distance, and the significance of any given human, or of humans in a more general sense, it all sort of just…melts away. People end up looking like either components of a dysfunctional natural system or containers for them.” Bel started to continue, then managed to catch herself. Reminded herself It wasn’t a friend.

“Nihilistic.” ‘Ms Hart’ noted.

“Absurd. And there’s a difference.” Bel pushed back.

“Not one that matters.”

“Not to you maybe.” Bel paused, noticing she was tapping her foot again. She made herself stop. Again. “How is this? For you? Are you getting what you wanted out of it?”

“Oh, very much so.” ‘Ms Hart’ grinned. “How about you?”

“I’m here because I have to be.” Bel reminded her.

“I know.”

“Because if I’m not, you hurt people I love.”

“Mmhmm.” ‘Ms Hart’ nodded brightly.

“And you have…zero guilt around that, clearly.”

“Why would I? You want to stop me? Stop me.” ‘Ms Hart’ shrugged. Bel glowered, sinking into her chair. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what the fuck I thought.”

“Are we done, here?” Bel hissed.

“I think that’s a good stopping point for the day. Catch you around, ‘author’.” ‘Ms Hart’’s visage wobbled, reverting to - from Bel’s subjective perspective at least - Kade. ‘Kade’ flicked her wrist with a wan smile, and Bel found herself back in South Bank.

Emotions never really seemed to hit her in a linear way. She could have a conversation; she’d have physical reactions to that conversation, and sharp, pointed, emotive reactions - most of which were suppressible - but then...later would be when the shift occurred. The state change. The stumble, trip, and fall into an entirely other emotional landscape.

Bel reached for her phone. Rain sounds played over the bluetooth speaker. Soft lamplight flooded the room in gold. She lay in her bed…knowing it was coming. Feeling the start of it; tracing out the edges of the fall. She began to type.

I feel something snap
In the back of my mind.
There’s no pain,
Just this feeling of tension.
Like the moment when a ligament tears
Or a joint twists,
And all I feel is the wrongness of it.
My brain lights up,
Alerting and warning
That the numbness
Means worse not better.
It’s a bubble encasing a moment,
Primed to burst
Whenever I’m least equipped;
Least prepared to handle
What I’ll find inside.

I already know, of course;
I always know.
It never helps; never has.
Blah blah blah…
Something about loneliness,
Or connection, or lack thereof…
Something about a sad, broken girl
Who no one ever sees
Or wants or loves.
Something about a boy
Who was never there to begin with.
Or white walls and peeling paint;
Or longing so intense it leaves me faint;
Or something about a painting
In a dark, dusty attic.
Blah blah fucking blah.
Self-pitying bullshit
Digging into my soul
Like termites devouring,
Compromising the structure of it.

It’s coming.
The feeling of it.
Do I set my teeth on edge and wait,
Or give in to panic?
Try to intellectualise it into
Harmless oblivion;
Start bothering everyone I know
With pain they neither
Relate to nor can help with?
I glance over at the mirror:
You look so tired.

And I’m so sorry.
I’m so fucking sorry
That I wasted so much time;
That I doomed us to this.
I know like you know
That there was a time when
Our scars were just wounds,
That were fresh and open and clean.
I know like you know
That I could have done something
Other than let infection set in;
Let sepsis take hold;
Then just let the fever burn itself out.
We survived, just barely, but
No thanks to me.
I let nature take its course;
Let those festering wounds scab over
And close jagged and crooked;
Weak at the seams;
Ugly and angry and forever red.
The damage that should be a memory
Is now indelibly, permanently
A part of me.
A part of us.

Can you forgive me?
Because I can’t forgive me.
I look back and blame Him,
But we both know we were always just us.
Me carrying our damage,
An ugly scarred coward
Cowering in our attic.
You out in the cold, cruel world,
Doing your best while I did my worst:
While I broke us in a thousand ways,
And a thousand times worse
Than the world ever did.

Break slow, I’d say:
Just break slow enough
That we can find a way
To avoid breaking completely.
Never let them see, I’d say:
Just be an inoffensive enough parasite
That they never notice the truth of you.
If you cost a shred of emotional labour
You’re not worth the price.
And here we are, now:
An apocalypse in slow motion;
A disaster no one can see unfolding.
Here we are, now:
Alone and unloved, but for
The utility of our ability
To pick brokenness apart until
It resembles functionality.
We’ve infected so many people
Who we love and cherish
With a tiny germ of the disease
That is killing us.
You remember the other day,
Someone called us ‘wise’?
All we did was show them how easy it is
And how freeing it feels,
To wallow in the worst of them
And call it self-acceptance.

And I’m so sorry.
I am so desperately fucking sorry.
I let it go on too long.
I prioritised survival over
Any metric of health or stability.
I made me so ugly that
I’m sure they see me behind your eyes
On some uncanny-valley level.
I fear that’s our problem:
That the damage I carry
Can be read on your face.
That those poorly healed scars
Are on display in some abstract way
That ensure you’ll be seen wrong,
As capable and strong…
As if our survival was by design
Rather than by cowardice or accident.
They will never, not ever, see you
As delicate or fragile;
A thing to be cherished, loved, and protected.
Never, not ever, as someone to be
Desired or longed for or sought;
To be craved, wanted or fought for.
We’re too much and not enough;
Only a victim or a survivor.

No one nurtures a bramble of weeds they find
Infesting their garden, you see.
It needs the same things as other plants do
But doesn’t deserve them.

No one sees a shattered pane of glass
For the individuated beauty
Of its million shards, skittering,
Each unique and glittering
But functionless and value-less.

I love you, at last,
After years of not facing
The negative space
Of the lack of us in our life.
But it’s not enough.
I think I broke the face that we show the world.

Oh.
Here it is, now.
The feeling of it.