[Issue 2023.66]

‘Between the Shadow and the Soul’, Davian Aw

Art © 2023 Toeken

---

It begins, as always, on the bus: cool air whispering past her skin, wheels rumbling down a foreign road, peace descending on her mind in that never-old feeling of coming home. The washed-out film hues meet her eyes as she opens them to greet the scene, and Johanna breathes—

(you think that’s air you’re breathing now?)

—and the fiction settles into reality.

Personality modules spin into motion and transform Johanna into Ashley. She turns to the window and meets the sight of her beautiful face framed by sun-gilt hair. Crafted memories rush over her own until that face is no longer a stranger’s, but hers, drawing her deep into the soft embrace of Ashley’s perfect life. It’s her life, now; her memories, her body, and everything is all right.

Johanna lets out a sigh, relaxing into her seat as the bus slows to a stop. She looks up when the doors clatter open and the preternaturally handsome young man hops on board. His rider knows this story as well as she, yet the surprise on his face is still passably genuine.

“Ashley?”

She beams. “Chris!” Script flows through her mind and spills from her lips in Ashley’s cultured voice. “Fancy seeing you here! Didn’t you move to Japan?”

Christopher grins. His blue eyes sparkle at her like azure pools of ethereal beauty—for this is just that sort of movie, where time gives way to slow eternities of romance and adjectives fall in purple ribbons out a scriptwriter’s pen.

“You weren’t there.” He slides onto her seat and plants a light kiss on her cheek. “That’s why I came back.”

Behind his eyes, Neal loses himself to the easy comfort of Christopher’s skin. The mere thought of Ashley sends the thrum of lovesick desire coursing through the veins of his virtual body, and he knows, for the space of those two short hours, what it must feel like to be normal.

Fireflies skirt their perfect frames as they stroll through Central Park in the autumn evening, arms wrapped around each other.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he says.

Ashley leans her head on his shoulder, and the programme floods Neal’s brain in a giddy wash of dopamine. He almost panics at the urgent desire throbbing through his blood, and has to stop walking, suddenly too aware of Ashley’s soft body against his, flushing him anew with the rush of love and Christopher’s penchant for distressingly saccharine lines.

“I love you,” he says. “I… I can’t believe I ever tried to leave. I’ll never—”

He gasps as she kisses him. Artificial lust explodes on cue in his mind and drags him down in helpless surrender to Christopher’s desires—hands sliding from Ashley’s face to her body as signals douse his brain with oxytocin, drowning him in a sea of overflowing love that threatens to burst through its virtual boundaries and into his reality.

Neal grasps her beautiful body in Christopher’s desperate hands and knows no other desire. He no longer feels alone. He no longer feels unloved.

He wants her. He loves her.

This is why he rides.

---

“Jo?”

The knocking comes again. “Johanna!”

Johanna’s eyes blink open. She rolls over on the threadbare couch, and her heart aches for the spacious bed in Christopher’s artfully-decorated Williamsburg loft, where she would wake by his side on silken white sheets as early sunlight glowed warmly upon their bare skin.

Muffled swearing from outside. A jangle of keys, too loud for the morning, and then her roommate Tess yanks the door open and comes in.

“Dammit, Jo.” She kicks the door shut, striding over to pull the curtains open. “Don’t tell me you’ve been rotting in here the whole time I was away.”

Sunlight glares into the room. Unwashed dishes clutter the sink. Used takeaway containers stack the floor. Tess shoves open a window to let in fresh air, muttering curses under her breath.

Johanna squints at the clock. 11:33 a.m. She stuffs her face in her pillow and groans.

“What time did you go to bed last night?” Tess demands.

“I ’unno.”

“Being Ashley again?”

Johanna winces, suddenly fully awake.

Tess rolls her eyes, taking that as a yes, and casts a cynical glance at the VR rig in the corner. “You’re a junkie,” she says, and stalks over to the sink.

Johanna’s fists clench over bedclothes, bracing herself for the usual spite at Ashley—that skinny rich straight white cis girl who wouldn’t last a minute in the real world, and Tess’ contempt at Johanna’s worshipful insistence that Ashley is a good person, an amazing, wonderful, beautiful, beautiful girl, and if she knew Ashley, really knew her, she would never…

The attack doesn’t come. The tap squeaks on. She hears water splash onto dishes.

“Do you ever plan on getting up?” Tess shouts from the sink. “Ashley wouldn’t lie in bed all d—”

Johanna recoils. “I’m up!” She clambers out of bed towards the bathroom, willing Tess to shut up, please just shut up…

“I just heard about someone else who got addicted to those things,” Tess remarks. “He picked up a smoking habit from his favourite character. One of Christopher’s friends—John, I think.”

Johanna tenses.

“…at first he only smoked inside the sim, but it spilled over, and now he’s as much on the way to lung cancer as I am. So don’t tell me those things aren’t dangerous—”

“I don’t care!” Johanna bursts out. “I’m happy in there, you understand? I’m happy! Why does that bother you so much?” She takes a shaky breath. Her gaze lands on her VR rig. Buying that had cleared out her savings. She had skipped meals, avoided transportation, survived off minimal utilities and struggled with no hormone therapy for a year just to afford it.

“It’s my money,” she adds. “It’s my life.”

“It’s Ashley’s life.”

Johanna glares at her.

“I keep telling you, Jo, it’s not safe,” Tess says, pausing a moment to look at her with hands deep in suds. “Nothing that has this kind of hold on you—”

“I feel safe in there,” Johanna retorts. “Did you know that? Out here I’m scared, all the time, but when I’m her, I… I’m not afraid anymore. And I don’t… I don’t hate myself anymore, because there I’m normal, and nobody thinks that I’m—”

“It’s not real.”

“I don’t care!” Johanna slams the bathroom door.

They never understand.

It’s the little things she rides for. The casual ease of an unmonitored gait, the careless, unrestrained laughter of joy, the absence of whispers, getting smiles instead of stares, enjoying jokes as their audience and not their punchline; feeling protected by police, understood by doctors, safe around friends, allowed around children, sunshine and rain and wind and birdsong and feeling like you belong: that you are real and exist and you are free… always, most of all, that you are free.

The first time Johanna rode the movies, she cried for an hour afterward.

And she knew that her life would never be the same again.

---

“The problem with traditional reparative therapy,” Neal writes on a blog that nobody reads, “is thinking aversion conditioning can do anything but make people feel like shit and kill themselves. You’ve got to make people’s desires work against them, not get rid of them.

“Get a gay guy, find out all his favourite things, and then weave that happiness into warm fuzzy narratives of heterosexuality so that every time he thinks of loving a girl, he’s reminded of his favourite music and raindrops on roses and hot naked guys frolicking in the fields. Eventually he’ll go straight from girl to arousal. Like Pavlov’s dog and the bell. Then he’ll be so drawn to her because of all those amazing feelings she gives him that he’ll be willing to date her, willing to marry her, and there’s your ex-gay success story. And nobody gets hurt and nobody kills themselves.”

Neal turns off his computer and goes to sleep and tries not to think of Spencer.

He dreams Christopher’s dreams.

The sky is white with sun. They stroll hand-in-hand along the Battery Park boardwalk, passing old streetlamps, couples cuddling on benches and fishermen casting lines into the water.

“It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?” Ashley asks.

Neal turns to her with a smile.

It’s no longer Ashley. The boy looks the same as the day he died. Forever nineteen, forever handsome, forever innocent.

“You ran,” Spencer says.

The park drops away to dusty streets and the smack of asphalt beneath Neal’s running feet. Spencer stumbles and falls like he did the first time, yelling as his ankle twists—

“Get up!” Neal screams. “Get up, get up, get up!”

Spencer can’t, eyes wide in horror, and he reaches out for Neal to help him up; but the gang is pounding down the road towards them, and so Neal rambles useless apologies and runs.

He runs like the selfish coward he is, trying not to think about the surprise in Spencer’s eyes—so much worse than anger would have been, as though he didn’t understand the betrayal, didn’t understand Neal’s cold awareness that stopping to help might doom them both, but if he ran…

The gang falls upon the fallen boy. Neal hears only their slurs and taunts in his wake and then the bone-chilling screams when they take first blood, each cry piercing his heart in wretched condemnation, tears stinging his eyes and spilling over in ugly sobs and still Neal runs, like he ran, and ran, and would never, ever, ever forgive himself.

He falls awake with legs twisted in bedclothes and screams into his pillow until he can scream no more.

Christopher would have stayed. Christopher would have fought. Christopher would never even think of running away and leaving his lover to suffer and die. Only cowards do that, despicable, selfish, pathetic cowards, who don’t deserve happiness and don’t deserve love.

---

Slide to answer.

“Hello?”

“Neal?”

“Hey, Tom, what’s up?”

“Your mum passed away last week. Nat told me.”

Silence.

“Neal?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, man.”

“How…”

“Heart failure. She’d been in hospital a while.”

Neal swallows. “Oh.”

“Look, man, if you need anything…”

“When’s the… when’s the funeral?”

“Yesterday.”

“…Right.”

“I’m sorry. If you need me to come over—”

“No, I’ll… I’ll be fine. Thanks, Tom.”

---

Neal slams the wall, eyes hot with tears. He pummels the brick, screaming in pain, beating his knuckles raw until he falls away from the wall with gasping sobs. He grasps at his VR gear. With shaking hands, he drags it on and launches a solo ride. Christopher’s thoughts smother his own in welcome nullification.

The pain is gone. He stands in the kitchen of Christopher’s childhood home. There’s a roast in the oven, soup simmering on the stove, siblings gone to get dessert, and his mother—Christopher’s mother—chopping vegetables alongside him, her presence steady and comforting in the way his own (I don’t have a son anymore) once was.

“She’s a lovely girl, Chris,” says his fake mother who’s his real mother and doesn’t even know him, and wouldn’t ever know that Spencer had been a lovely boy. But Chris doesn’t know either, and Chris doesn’t care, and the smile comes easily to his lips.

“I’m lucky to have her,” he says in all sincerity.

“Your father would have been proud.”

Neal nods, wiping a hand across his eyes as memories of Christopher’s father play on cue in his mind. His image still adorns the walls in family photos around the house: Dad and Mom, Chris and Laura and Danny. The perfect American family.

“Do you remember the last thing he said to you?”

“Yeah,” Neal says. “He said… (get the fuck out of my house) … He said: ‘I’m sorry I won’t always be here for you, son. But I believe in you. And I know you’re gonna be a better man than I ever was.’”

His mother lovingly strokes his back. Christopher’s body shakes with sobs. Neal doesn’t resist, even though this is a horrible, horrible script with hackneyed dialogue and terrible acting, and when she pulls him into an embrace and murmurs teary words of comfort, Neal hugs her tight, drowning in love, and knows that no other world need matter: not now, not before, and not ever again.

---

“Dance with me,” Neal whispers to Johanna.

The warmth of his hand envelops her own, adventure shining in his eyes. And so they deactivate the plot and run hand-in-hand down the long, open streets of a world made for them, escaping into a night warmed by lamp-lit romances and blending effortlessly into happy crowds.

It’s called free-willing it.

They spin new adventures out of the digital ether in the invulnerable guises of Chris and Ashley: outrunning the loading map to kiss along its poorly-rendered edges, laughing as they weave in and out of stores to place funny hats on unamused staff, predicting the future to awed background extras, counting down to thunderstorms and small mishaps, prank-calling friends, trying to rob banks, speaking dialogue entirely in bad Shakespearean English.

Many doors are locked; some roads are always blocked. Some cars make circuitous routes round and round the city. But enough of the world is open to them, enough of their characters’ lives waiting to be discovered, and always, every time, they fall in love—over and over and over again, embroiled in the passions of their fictional shells, as somewhere within them, in ever-growing yearning, they reach out across that strange and star-crossed space between the shadow and the soul.

“Look at all the stars,” he says.

They’re standing on the High Line. Passersby flash kind smiles at their display of young love. This place is theirs; the city and its people are theirs, all swept up in the tide of their romance.

Johanna falls back against his arms and raises her face towards the heavens, constellations lighting up the darkness in a dazzling array that would never be visible in the real world.

“I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid,” she murmurs. “So I could leave this world.”

Her parents had been ecstatic, of course. Little Johnny, finally interested in boy stuff! Yet their enthusiasm only dampened hers, for Johanna would not openly pursue an interest that reinforced a lie. The desire to be seen tugged too strongly at her heart.

“We’re already in another world,” Neal says. “You know, there’s this theory that if there’s a simulation that’s complex enough to contain sentient observers, then their world physically exists for them. It’s as real as they are, see.”

“What’s that mean for us, Christopher? We’re fictional too.”

“Yeah,” he says, meeting her eyes. “This world is as real as we are.”

Johanna runs a finger along his lower lip. “What’s your real name, Chris?”

He lowers his gaze. “Neal,” he says. “You?”

“Johanna.”

It feels weird, hearing her own name spoken so gently in Ashley’s voice, as if perhaps someone like Ashley could like someone like her.

Neal runs his hand through her soft hair, settling in a caress on the back of her neck. “Johanna,” he repeats, and her heart skips a beat.

“Every night,” he says. “You’re always here for me.”

Her lips find his and he moves into the kiss.

In another world, whenever his own touch is not enough, Neal bites down screams and runs out to alleviate the loneliness in his heart—introducing himself to strangers for the small relief of a handshake, or imagining the press of subway commuters as the awkward embrace of loving arms.

In this world, he is never alone. Right now, he’s Neal and she’s Johanna, and he loves her so, so much.

---

The second-hand bookshop is quiet today. There’s an hour to go before the end of her shift. Specks of dust dance in the space between the shelves, lit up like falling sparks in the melting sun.

Johanna sits on a stool by the rows of books amidst the smell of age and vanilla, carefully cutting out printed genre signs to replace the faded, badly-designed ones hanging from the ceiling.

The door opens with a jangle of bells. She chucks a superfluous strip of laminated paper into the trash.

“Johanna? You never told me you worked here!”

She glances up at the young man who just breezed through the door. “Hey, Phil.”

“…at least, I assume you’re working here, and you’re not just an enthusiastic customer. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never wanted to replace those things.” Phil appraises the current signs with a raised eyebrow. “Seriously, there are like three different fonts on the ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’ one. Though whoever thought of printing ‘Horror’ in Comic Sans was a genius. It’s the scariest thing I’ve seen in my life. You should leave that one up.”

Johanna groans. “What do you want, Phil?”

“Oh, nothing. I just thought I’d drop by and see how Kate is doing, but she doesn’t seem to be around. Huh. I hear she broke up with Tess. Wow, I haven’t seen you in a really long time. I almost thought someone killed you, but I didn’t hear your name at—”

“Shut it, Phil. How much coffee did you drink?”

He brushes the comment aside with a wave. “You doing okay?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t remember you being this quiet. What happened to that Darren guy you were seeing?”

“Broke up. He got arrested last year for humping mannequins in a store.” Johanna shrugs. “I guess he found the real women he wanted.”

“Huh.” Phil reaches for an exciting bit of twisty wire hanging from the ceiling.

“Don’t touch that.”

“Oh, sorry.” He releases the exciting twisty wire. “How much is Kate paying you? You don’t look like you’ve been eating much. Hey, if you’ve got any issues paying for E or spiro or anything, I might know someone who could help. Black market, so it’s not completely legal. Well, it’s not at all legal, really, but—”

“No.”

Phil shrugs. “Okay.”

“I said don’t touch that.”

Phil lets go of the twisty wire. “Is everything okay? Really. I know it’s late, so maybe you’re just tired—coffee is great for that, just saying, and I got a Starbucks staff discount you can use. What ails thee, Daughter of Eve?”

“Nothing,” Johanna says. “I’ve been riding the movies.”

Phil’s face drops. “Oh.”

“It’s amazing, Phil. It’s… it’s so real.”

“Okay.”

“Have you tried it?”

Phil lets out a nervous laugh. “Jo… I know that if I ever go in that thing and it’s a quarter as good as everyone says, I’m never going to leave. Even if it kills me, you know? Reality could never match up.”

“I know.”

“But… I want it so bad.” Phil grips a shelf. “To know what it’s like. Even if just for a minute… Except it won’t be a minute, because I don’t have that kind of self-control. I’ve seen what it does to people. It’s like half the trans community sold their souls to that thing, and that’s only because the other half can’t afford it. I just heard of another one who merged. Friend of a friend. They found his body still hooked up to the rig, said he’d been in there for three days straight.”

“Do you think it works?” Johanna asks in a small voice. “Merging.”

“That’s the theory, right? That riding creates a new consciousness from your mind and your character’s, one that’s hosted on the network and not in your brain.”

“A logical description of a mind,” Johanna says. “Experiencing a world that’s as real as it is.”

Phil nods. “Yeah. Logic remains true even when not expressed, and that includes the data describing each consciousness. Even if the network goes down, maybe you just keep going. Maybe no one ever leaves. Maybe logging out just makes a copy of your mind. So if you died here, the only universe you experience is the one where you stay on, and… the movie would become your only life.”

“It would be real.”

Phil looks to her, eyes suddenly vulnerable. “What if it works, Jo? Just imagine…”

She doesn’t need to. She thinks about it all the time.

He sighs and drops his gaze. “But I can’t risk that. Not after everything. And if I ever got hold of a rig… the temptation would be too great, you know? And… you…”

“I can’t stop, Phil,” she says quietly. “I don’t want to.”

“I know.” Phil drags his hand off the shelf. “No one does.” He gestures at the books. “At least you’ve got this,” he says. “You’re still out here. Doing stuff.” Phil hesitates, then nods and turns to go. “Guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

“Phil—”

He turns, and Johanna’s heart breaks on the cusp of her apology. For she can never tell her friends how her dreams betray theirs and the cruel prices they paid to love themselves. Self-love is hard. Cowardice is easier—giving in and believing all the bad things the world says about you, luring you with its promises of freedom and love if only you would give yourself up and become someone else.

“It’s nice to see you again,” she says instead.

“I almost thought you would’ve managed to stay out of it,” Phil says. “You were always the strong one.”

She bites her lip.

“Everyone’s riding, and it’s… been lonely.” He trails off, then looks away from her and turns back to the door. “Tell Kate and Tess I said hi.”

---

The ballroom is empty at this time. In the movie, it is filled with chandeliers and cheers as the newlyweds dance across the floor. Each breath-taking movement is impeccably precise, their bodies flowing in sync, trusting in the simulation to guide them along until finally, it ends, and he catches her.

It’s just them, now.

The ballroom ends in a curved wall of glass looking out onto the evening sky. Hardwood floors glow beneath golden rays of setting sun. Every step echoes. Every word.

They dance.

Ashley’s innate grace sweeps Johanna across the floor with a lightness her own feet would never manage. Christopher’s hand rests securely on her slender waist, releasing her in a twirl, and then holding her safe again, his eyes locked on hers.

The artificial night darkens. They tire, and settle down by the window as streetlamps wink on outside.

Neal looks at Ashley and loves that he loves her.

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

She smiles. “So are you.”

A laugh. “Thank you.”

They fall to silence. Neal looks down at his hands. They’re a stranger’s hands, leanly muscled beneath pale skin with a stranger’s identity in their fingertips. Inviolate, invulnerable. This skin never felt the warmth of Spencer’s touch. These eyes never saw his last expression of surprise. These legs never ran away, and here he is not a coward, here he is a good and decent person, here he could listen to the story of Neal-the-stranger and judge him from the safety of another man’s shadow.

Does Neal exist in this world? he wonders. The virtual world was built upon the blueprints of reality, its inhabitants drawn from the databases of people who actually lived there. If Neal were to leave this city in Christopher’s skin and travel to his home, he might very well find himself; but what would that Neal think of this handsome stranger showing up out of nowhere in search of him?

“Why do you ride, Neal?” Johanna asks softly.

He raises his head. “Why do you?”

“Freedom.” She hugs her knees.

“Yeah.” Neal watches the stretch of their foreign shadows against the ballroom floor. “There’s that.”

He sees his faint reflection in the window glass. Christopher stares back at him, untroubled and confident, Neal hidden safely within the perfect costume of his perfect body. Right now, he looks like—he is—the sort of man he was never good enough for.

Neal imagines that face politely rejecting him, and nausea rises in his throat.

“I don’t know if I should do this anymore,” he says.

“What?”

“I’m always running away. This is just more of that, isn’t it? I thought that if I could get far enough, everything would stop hurting, but I’m so tired, Johanna. I’m so tired of running.”

He turns his face back to Ashley’s petite frame silhouetted against the nightlights of Manhattan, and Neal finds himself captured by the startling green of her eyes.

All it took was the bell for Pavlov’s dog to salivate.

“Maybe we should meet,” he says.

“You mean, in the real…”

“Yes.”

“No,” Johanna says, a bit too quickly. “No, I… I don’t think we should.”

“I know I can’t keep doing this, but… I don’t know how I’d be able to cope, and… I get the feeling you won’t be able to, either, if I go.”

Johanna’s gaze is locked on her knees.

“But if we had each other,” Neal says, “we could still pretend, and then this never really has to end—”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“Does it matter?” Neal asks, taking her smaller hand in his. “Whoever I think you really are is no less fiction than Ashley is. Even if you were secretly, I don’t know, some burly, serial-killing dude locked up somewhere, it’s still you.”

Johanna looks up.

“And… and I think I love you,” Neal says. “I mean, not in the same way as Ashley, but…”

“Okay.”

---

Neal waits among the shelves of movie titles waiting to be downloaded, old fashioned streaming codes ready beside their animated glass displays. He’s standing in front of their movie. It’s the sole interactive title, decorated with cherry-picked quotes of critical praise, tiny holographic versions of Christopher and Ashley gazing adoringly at each other from within their fragile prisons. In the glass, Neal sees his own reflection: hopelessly different, hopelessly outside, the betraying screen dividing worlds that should have always been one.

“Neal?”

He turns, and his heart breaks in sudden understanding.

Johanna sees it in his face. She steps back. “I’m sorry. I… I’m so sorry… “

“Jo—”

But she’s turned and walked quickly back out the door, too visible, too open, head bent and hot wetness pricking at her eyes in the knowledge that nothing ever changes. She was naïve to have expected him to be different from the others, naïve to think their virtual romance would ever—

She crashes into someone.

Standing in the movie store, Neal hears a familiar slur.

A chill grips his heart.

There’s a group of young men clustered outside the store. They’re shouting and pushing someone around, and then Neal spots Johanna’s terrified face in their midst.

He shoves the door open, hurtling wildly towards the gang. “Leave her alone!”

The guys look over. One breaks into laughter. “That’s not a girl, man. Look, I’ll show y—”

Neal lunges at him and drags him to the ground, yelling as angry shouts fill the air. Rough hands grab him, pulling him back, and he sees a flash of Johanna’s startled expression—she still looks nothing like Ashley, but there’s something in her eyes that is undeniably, achingly familiar.

A fist meets his face and he falls into darkness.

He comes to seconds later. He’s lying on the ground. The store clerk is yelling. The gang is running away. Johanna is lying next to him.

She reaches out a hand. He grasps it.

---

Lights from the moving displays flicker on their bodies through the glass, both of them contaminants outside its garden of fictional perfection. Neal stares mutely into the lights, his body still throbbing with pain. He feels Johanna’s hand in his, so familiar and yet not, and the world seems, for a moment, balanced precariously upon the boundary of fiction and reality.

They help each other to their feet.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Johanna says. She reddens. “But thanks. It was… brave.”

Brave. Neal remembers the look in Spencer’s eyes. “Thanks,” he says quietly.

There’s only the approaching night to hide them from the world as they walk, nursing their bruises, two shadows making their way beneath the trees along an empty stretch of road. They can pretend they’re somewhere else—perhaps strolling along the East River like Christopher and Ashley might, watching the setting sun turn the clouds pink over the eastern skyline of Manhattan.

“What was your name?” Neal asks, during an awkward lapse in conversation.

Johanna winces. “It’s rude to ask.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

A pair of cyclists passes by. Bicycle bells ring in the ending twilight.

“…John,” she finally says, half-whispered. “And then just ‘Jo’ for a while, so strangers could add on an ‘E’ if they liked, depending on how they read me…”

Neal nods.

They fall back into silence.

“I guess we couldn’t have had everything,” he says eventually. “It would have been too perfect, you know? Chris and Ashley all over again. But you’re in love with someone who doesn’t exist, and I… I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”

They pause at the intersection. Cars flash by in the night.

“You ride to find yourself,” Neal says. “I ride to destroy myself. And now… I’m just lost.”

Johanna reaches out and gently turns his face to hers. “No, Neal,” she says. “Don’t be.”

He blinks. Her face seems to change in the passing headlights. He sees Ashley; he sees Spencer; the street seeming to fall away around him, transporting him to another world, and as his lips part, she tentatively pulls him into her first real kiss. His eyes flicker shut. Painful hope wrests at his heart—but then he steps back.

“Dance with me,” Johanna begs, the plea shining in her eyes.

He shakes his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I like guys.”

Her eyes flash. “You can pretend.” The words stab her heart in their self-betrayal, but Johanna still longs for another person behind Neal’s eyes and she’s used to things that hurt. “Just like you said back in the ballroom. Pretend I’m… who people used to think I was. It won’t be any more unreal than it was with Ashley, and I’ll pretend you’re Chris, and it’ll be just like we’re riding—”

Neal grimaces. “Johanna, you deserve better than this, okay?” He hesitates. “We both deserve better than this.”

The lights turn orange.

“You said you loved me,” she says.

“Things are… different, now. I’m sorry.”

Johanna gazes bitterly out at the street. If she were like Ashley, maybe it would have been different. If being with her could have evoked enough of others’ approval to make up for the void of absent attraction, maybe he would have agreed to pretend to love…

“Johanna?”

She turns her head slowly.

“Friends?”

She gives a half-shrug. “Friends.”

The pedestrian lights turn green. Johanna crosses the street without him, and tries not to look back.

---

“They’re shutting it off,” Tess says a week later, sliding the phone across the table. “Midnight.”

“What? Why?”

“They won’t say, but I’d guess it’s that merging thing. It sounds like quite a lot of people have been killing themselves to be one with their characters.”

Johanna stares at the article. “They can’t do that. It’s… it’s my life, they can’t just—”

“Please, there’s more to your life than that heterosexist fantasy—”

Johanna bangs her fist down on the table. “This is all I have, Tess!” she shouts. “Do you get that? It’s the only place I’m happy! Where… where I’m normal, where I can be loved… and… and I don’t know what it is about me that’s so repulsive that people can only love me when I’m pretending to be someone else, but in there they do, and I can’t lose that, I can’t…”

“Jo—”

“…and that’s not something you can ever understand! You can afford to be angry because people will still care, you can afford to break up with Kate because you know there’ll be others, but not for me, because all that just makes it worse, and then they hate me and… and I just… I just want people to like me.” Joanna swallows back tears. “Why is that so bad, Tess? Why?”

“Shhhh.”

Tess pulls her into a tight hug and Johanna cries into her shoulder, the way she cried back when she first rode the movies and thought that everything would be okay, and she would never need to be sad again with perfect escapism just a connection away. She cries for lost dreams and the premature deaths of people who have never lived: for Ashley, for Christopher, and for the person she could have been if their realities had never crossed.

“You’ll be okay, Jo,” Tess says. “You were stronger once. You’ll be okay.”

---

The closing announcement blares hourly from televisions, billboards, the front pages of newspapers and covers of magazines. It bears down on her in huge letters from every screen in Times Square.

Template crowds flow obliviously by along their preset paths. For a moment, Johanna is overwhelmed with the desire to run off and join their flowing mass, merging anonymous in their midst as another citizen of this world—to dive into the subway depths and blast away from the reaches of the electronic fingers that would yank her roughly from the only place that has ever truly been home.

“Johanna?”

She turns.

Christopher stands out from the rest of the crowd: brighter, more alive, more saturated with colour.

“It’s me,” he says hurriedly, taking her hands. “It’s Neal. I heard they were shutting it d—”

Johanna grabs him in a tight hug.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she cries.

He kisses the top of her head. “I’ve missed you too.”

“They’re ending it,” she says. “It’s going to be over, all of it—”

“Not yet. Come on. Let’s get out of this crowd.”

They walk west to the Hudson in silence. The street opens up to blue sky and river as cool breezes sweep across the avenues and through their hair. They are untouchable in this moment, secure in perfect disguises, flawlessly blameless to the world they move in.

She twines her fingers with his. They meet the river and turn south, passing docked boats and tourist attractions and messy lines of traffic—people, so many people, alive in a bustle of noise, New Jersey lining the opposite shore and hinting at a world beyond this city filled with promise and hope and billions of souls who call it home.

And she knows, in her heart, that it would take far more than unplugged servers to stop this place existing. Somehow or other, it would always live on.

As would Chris and Ashley.

As would they.

They slow to a stop by the metal railings. Small waves break against the concrete below.

Johanna closes her eyes. She feels the wind against her face, and just breathes.

“There’s a theory,” Neal says. “No one ever leaves.”

“I know.”

“Every ride… that’s hundreds of copies of us. Stuck in other worlds like this. It’s a bit disturbing.”

“Yeah. But sometimes I still wish…”

The words fade from her lips. Johanna swallows, heart seared with a rash of desperate longing.

“Me too,” Neal says quietly.

Johanna takes his hand and squeezes it. They gaze out upon the waters in silence. She tries to remember every detail, every sensation, the shape of this peace and the sound of its stillness.

“What happens next?” she asks eventually. “When we wake?”

“I don’t know. I guess that’s the beauty of it, huh? Forever free-willing it in a world bigger than anything a computer can create…”

“Where anything is possible,” Johanna whispers.

Neal smiles—an uneasy, hopeful smile—and she burns the image into her memory: Christopher, ethereally beautiful by the riverside.

There’s a beep from Neal’s wristwatch. A one-minute countdown has begun.

She leans into his shoulder. He wraps an arm around her waist.

And they hold each other, waiting for the world to end.

First appeared in Future Visions: Volume 1 anthology in 2018.

© 2023 Davian Aw

[Issue 2023.66]

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