Chapter 2
"In pursuit of meaning, and the essence of my being, I left behind, what was, what is, what could have been..."
James is dead.
The words were a cold stone in my stomach as I ran. My breath hitched, my lungs burning in the damp, still air. The house of my dead friend was behind me, its silence louder than any scream. I stumbled into the street, my shoes slipping on the wet pavement of this fog-choked neighborhood that was and wasn't my own.
A memory, sharp and unwanted, cut through the panic.
I checked my phone for the tenth time. No messages. This wasn't like James. The James I knew would have been here fifteen minutes early, already sipping a coffee and sketching in his notebook. But that James had been fading for months. Ever since we'd gone to different colleges, a silence had grown between us, thick and heavy as a wall. Our calls became shorter, his excuses flimsier. I'd heard the rumors, of course, whispers about a group of seniors at his college, about things being "rough." But when I asked him, his voice would go flat. "It's fine, Aron. Don't worry about it." The light in his eyes, the one that used to match the pace of his frantic, brilliant thoughts, had been slowly going out.
"Hey, Aron..?" My mother's voice, from the phone, from the past, from nowhere.
"Yes, Mom."
"Are you coming home?"
"No. I am waiting for James..." The sentence is a fossil. A relic from a world that no longer exists.
Back in the fog, I stumbled. The memory was a hole I kept falling through. James was dead. Long ago. And yet, here I was, chasing his ghost through a neighborhood that was and wasn't.
There was a pause on the other end. I could hear her breathing. "Aron... honey. There's been an accident. With James..."
My heart stuttered. "James? What kind of accident?"
Another pause, heavier this time. "After he called you... he went to the railway tracks. He... he's gone, Aron. I'm so sorry."
"Oh dear,...I am sorry again, but he is dead.."
The words didn't fit in my head. They were the wrong shape, like trying to force a key into a lock it wasn't made for. The cheerful clatter of the cafe around me didn't stop; it just became a distant, tinny noise, like a radio playing in another room. I was aware of the cold weight of the phone against my ear, the sticky surface of the table under my other hand. James. Rail way. Dead.
"Aron? Are you there?" my mother's voice buzzed.
"Hmmm," I managed, my throat tight. "Mom... can I talk to you later?"
I hung up. I sat there. The world had not ended. The sun was still shining. And James was gone. The contradiction was so immense it felt like a physical hole had been torn in the center of everything.
Something had become nothing.
Now, in this impossible place, I held a letter from him. Dated one week after he died. The paper felt cold and wrong in my hands. My fingers trembled.
I looked up, and my breath caught.
A figure stood in the middle of the road ahead, perfectly still. It was wrapped in a see-through veil that swayed gently in the dead air. Through the cloth, I saw the vague, terrible shape of a burned face.
My body moved before my mind could. I turned and ran, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I took a left, then a right, ducking into an alley that should have led away. But I skidded to a halt, my shoes scraping on the pavement. The same figure stood ahead, unmoved, as if I had been running in place.
I fell, the impact jolting up my wrists. I was now just a few feet from it.
"Who are you!?" I shouted, my voice swallowed by the fog.
The veil stirred. The voice was not male or female, but the sound of static between stations. "A question that presupposes an 'I' to answer. A fragile premise. You might as well ask the void its name."
"Stop it! Is this a dream?"
"The dream is what you left. A consensus reality. A comfortable lie. Here, the lies are stripped away. You are not Aron, the student. You are the Aron-shaped question that death left behind. The letter did not arrive late. You simply were not ready to read it until now. Yet you should be asking how will I be destroying myself today?"
The question was casual, horrifying. "I just want to go back!"
"Back?" A sound like dry laughter. "To the dream? You can no more un-know what you are than a universe can uninflate. You have already begun the destruction. You are asking 'why?'"
A patch of darkness detached itself from a nearby wall. It wasn't a shape, but a moving void, a tear in the fabric of everything. It flowed over the Tallis.
There was no sound. No struggle.
She dissolved into a small pile of fine, gray ash on the pavement.
Gone.
I crawled forward, my hand reaching for the ashes, a stupid, hopeless need to somehow put her back together.
"Ashes."
The whisper was cold against the back of my neck.
Every muscle in my body locked. My blood turned to ice.
"Insignificant."
Slowly, my joints screaming in protest, I turned my head.
She stood there. The Tallis. Whole. Unburned. The same veil, the same terrible face beneath it. It was as if the last moment had been snipped out of time and thrown away.
She looked down at me where I knelt, paralyzed in the street.
"You looked for me in the remnants," she said, her layered voice soft and relentless. "A search for a solid thing in a world of echoes. I am not in the ashes. I am the fire. And I am what remains after the burning."
She took a silent step closer, her presence swallowing the world.
"You keep asking how to leave. That is a child's question, a plea for a simpler dream. There is only one question that matters here, where all things end and begin. The one you have been running from."
She leaned down. The edge of her veil brushed my forehead. It felt like cobwebs and a dying static charge.
Her final whisper was the softest sound I had ever heard, and it filled the universe.
"If you are the one having the dream," she breathed, "then who is the one dreaming you?"