Chapter 1 - Comatose Till I Overdose

  “Man fuck this shit!”

  I slam the door of my 2006 Nissan Murano with the ferocity of a scorned god and the tires give an indignant screech as if to emphasize my anger as I peel out of Lucy’s driveway. My glove compartment, temperamental bastard that it is, pops open, revealing the half chewed sticks of beef jerky, the several volumes of trashy manga, and a notebook full of half finished recipes that I am constantly tinkering with. I slam it shut. Taking a look in the rearview mirror, I catch a glimpse of myself. Messy black hair, in desperate need of a cut, unshaved stubble, and the remnants of a puberty filled with acne frame my face. My eyes are brown and I think they are fairly plain, but I’ve been told they deeply expressive. I’m about 5’9”, in pretty good shape (cause I don’t eat enough), and right now, I’m pissed! The suburban streets whiz by in a blur. I’m not entirely sure whether the blurring is due to the speed of the car or the tears that stream unbidden down my cheeks. Even though it was me who dumped her, the end of an almost five year relationship is rarely a happy affair, and this one certainly isn’t. The sun is shining brightly outside my window, and birds are chirping merrily along the street, perched on branches covered in beautiful Autumn leaves. How dare they! How dare the world be happy while I’m miserable! In righteous fury, I roll down my window and shove my hand, middle finger standing proudly in defiance, out towards the side of the road.

  “Fuck you birds! I hope someone shits on your windshield!”

  As I merge onto the turnpike, it occurs to me that I don’t have a destination. Then it occurs to me that I don’t particularly want one. I don’t care where I’m going, as long as I’m going away. Away from her. Away from everything. Away from this world that has trodden upon my life over and over and over again. I glance at my speedometer. I’m going 15 over the speed limit… eh, whatever. Whether it is due to the tears or the rage or simply that I don’t care enough to be focused on the road beyond my usual autopilot that I go into when highway driving, I don’t notice the strange golden particles floating out of the driver’s side window of the car in front of me. I don’t notice as the car begins slowing down quickly, not as if the breaks have been pressed, but as if the foot pressed down on the gas wasn’t there anymore. I finally notice when the car is shooting towards me, all momentum gone. It’s already too late.

  I swerve and slam on the breaks, and my car goes careening down the highway, tumbling like a twenty sided die thrown from an excited hand, finally slamming into the pavement with a one pointed at the sky, sneering in disdain. In the moments before everything goes black, I wonder if this is it: God’s final fuck you, the shit stained bow on a shit stained life. Then comes the crash, and the visceral crunch of my head slamming into the roof of the car, and all at once, I stop wondering.

  “Calvin honey, what on earth are you doing?”

  Mom? Is that Mom’s voice? How long has it been since I heard that? I can’t remember. Everything seems fuzzy.

  “I’m eating knights, mommy! I kidnapped this princess fair and square and these poopfaces want to take her from me!”

  …Is that what I sounded like as a 7 year old? Gross. Wait, I haven’t been 7 for… uh… a long time I think.

  “I see, so the asparagus are knights. Is the princess the bacon or the mashed potatoes?”

  “The bacon, duh. Princesses aren’t made out of mashed potatoes, silly.”

  Yeah mom, princesses aren’t made out of mashed potatoes. Everybody knows that. Suddenly the image comes into focus. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my childhood home, and the summer wind is blowing in from the window, tousling my dirty blond hair. Across from me is my mother, resplendent auburn hair constrained in a high pony tail, an amused smile dancing across her lips. Her piercing green eyes, the same as mine, hold a mischievous twinkle, one which ignites both a nostalgic joy, and a familiar pang of heartbreak. Even at the very end, she never lost that twinkle. She coughs suddenly. It’s a short, violent cough. She shrugs it off.

  “Y’know honey, every time I cough an angel loses its penis. Lotta eunuchs up in hell these days,” she says with a wink. To the left of her, my dad, a tall and lanky man with dark brown hair and blue eyes, spits his coffee onto the table.

  “Maggie he’s seven!” he exclaims at the same time as I say, “What’s a eunuch?"

  “Oh please Thomas,” Mom replies, “He’s old enough to know what a penis is,” and completely ignoring my dad’s judgmental glare, she turns to me. “A eunuch is a man who has had his penis chopped off hun.”

  “That’s horrible! Why is there a word for that!”

  “Well a long time ago, whenever little boys were disobedient to their mothers, drastic measures had to be taken. It happened so often that they made a word for it. Now if you don’t finish your food and get ready for school, mommy is gonna make you a eunuch, got it?”

  With a giggle and a dramatic scream, I hurry to finish my food, while my dad has a hushed conversation with my mom about her unfortunate habit of threatening me with bodily harm. The image fades.

  A new image forms. I’m sitting on the curb outside my middle school. Immediately, I recognize the day. A day I will never forget. I’m 12 years old, struggling my way through my 6th grade curriculum, the school year nearing its end. Dad is late. The school day ended at three, and every other day, almost without fail, I would walk out the double doors as soon as we were let out to find dad’s car waiting just outside, but not today. Today it is… I look down at my flip phone for the 19th time… 4:15 and dad’s car still hasn’t pulled into the lot. As I do, the phone buzzes, my ringtone sounding, and with relief I see the caller is my dad.

  “Dad! Where are you? It’s been eons!”

  “Hey kiddo. There’s no easy way to say this, I’m at the hospital.”

  My relief immediately vacates the premises. “OH MY GOD ARE YOU OK!?”

  “Kiddo, I’m fine. It’s your mother. She collapsed. She’s getting checked out now. I’m coming to pick you up. Do you want to go home or to the hospital to see mom?”

  I don’t hesitate for a second, “Hospital.”

  “Alright kiddo, I’m on my way. See you soon.”

  Dad hangs up and I sit there in shock. I stare blankly at a dark spot in the concrete for the entire half hour it takes for dad to arrive. Silently, I walk around the car and get in the front passenger seat. Dad doesn’t say anything, he just starts driving. The image fades.

  Highschool is clearly not all that it was hyped up to be. I don’t remember who told me in middle school that highschool is at all different, but based on the outside of the building on the first day, they fucking lied. Just as I plant my hands on my hips and scoff imperiously at the letdown of a building, I hear a giggle behind me. I turn around, and every statement of wit and bravado I had practiced that morning in the mirror dies in my throat as I see the most beautiful girl in the world. With my growth spurt not yet finished (or at least that’s what I tell myself), she is a little taller than me, standing about 5’ 8” and covering her mouth with her hand in an attempt to stifle her giggles. Her long black hair, interspersed with strands of pink and blue, frames the chestnut brown skin of her face as smoothly as water flowing around a rock in a stream. Someone else, someone of lesser taste, might point out the duct tape holding her large round glasses together, or the acne clutching its insidious hold to her cheeks, but I don’t notice a single thing outside of those large brown eyes. They are so large they could wrap the world twice over, and they must be just as deep, for as I stare into their surface I can feel myself falling for miles into those oceans of chocolate brown. I think we have a conversation, and I’m pretty sure I don’t entirely embarrass myself, but what was actually said I can’t even begin to remember, for the moment we part feels like waking from a glorious dream into the bleakest of mornings, every memory of the interaction instantly becoming fleeting and distant. All except the girl’s name. I remember that her name is Lucy, and I will never forget it. For those short minutes when I had first spoken to her, nothing else had mattered but her. Even my mom’s lung cancer that the doctors said they caught early but never seems to go away had managed to take a back seat to the marvel that was those utterly captivating eyes. But now that she’s gone, everything comes back, and I force a confident smile back onto my face, shove that fleeting terror that the next time I see my mom will be the time when her lungs have given up completely deep down into my heart, rub away the treacherous tear that starts forming in my eye, and make my way to homeroom. The image fades.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Today is the day. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest. Today I’m finally gonna kiss Lucy. I’ve already planned it out, every little detail. She’s coming over to do homework with me at my house in a couple minutes, and dad’s at work, as always (I wish he was around more but I am well aware of the pressure mom’s medical bills have put on him). I’m going to ask Lucy how her midterms went, and when she tells me they went amazing (she’s one of the smartest kids in our grade), I’m going to smile and kiss her in congratulations, the perfect plan for the perfect moment to celebrate her accomplishment. My perfect plan doesn’t seem to help the shaking in my hands, nor stop the sweat from pooling in my palms. The doorbell rings and I rush over, swinging the door wide open. There stands Lucy, as radiant as the day I met her. Ok, this is it, breathe Calvin, breathe.

  “Hi Lucy, how were your midterms?” Nailed it.

  “Oh, uh, I overslept and missed Algebra 2”

  “Oh my god that’s awesome, congratulations!” Without waiting for the words she actually said to register, I lean forward and deliver the least elegant kiss that any buffoon has ever delivered.

  …Wait what?

  My eyes go wide and I stare at her. Her equally wide eyes stare back at me. The silence stretches for what feels like centuries. All at once, we both burst out laughing. With an amused smile on her face, she opens her mouth to say the words I was hoping to hear. The words she is supposed to say. But the voice that exits her mouth isn’t hers at all, and doesn’t match the movement of her lips. If I could read lips and was deaf, the words she said would have been “took you long enough, idiot,” but instead my stupid ears have to pick up the cold and mechanical voice that rings out.

  “Calvin Xenos, you have been selected for the sixth wave of system initiation. Please select your tutorial difficulty from the following options: Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard, and Hell. Please keep in mind that the rewards from higher difficulties reflect the increased chance of death.”

  “Uh… Lucy? Why are you talking like that”

  “Calvin Xenos, please select a tutorial difficulty. If you do not select a tutorial difficulty, one will be selected at random.”

  In this moment, some clarity of the real Calvin, the Calvin who has already lived through his first kiss with Lucy, and years after, returns to me. I don’t understand what’s happening, but I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge.

  “Uh, hell difficulty I guess”

  “Calvin Xenos, please select a tutorial difficulty. If you do not select a tutorial difficulty, one will be selected at random. You have 30 seconds remaining to make a choice.”

  “I said hell difficulty! Can you hear me? HELL DIFFICULTY.”

  “You have not selected a tutorial difficulty and one will therefore be selected for you at random. Your tutorial difficulty has been selected as Very Easy.”

  “WHAT THE FUCK!”

  “The Very Easy tutorial grants your tutorial instance one randomly selected extremely beneficial modifier. The modifier that has been selected is Starting Safe Zone. Good luck, initiate.”

  “Well fuck you I guess.”

  Suddenly, I’m back in my house, and Lucy is staring at me, confused.

  “Calvin? You spaced out there for a second, are you ok?”

  Uh… am I? I feel like something happened but it’s fuzzy all of a sudden. Whatever.

  “Yeah Lucy, I’m fine.” The image fades.

  “Mom, this is Lucy.”

  The clean white of the hospital is sickening to me after years of mom lying here, getting weaker and weaker. The doctors say it won’t be long now. She lies there, on the bed. Her auburn hair is long gone, replaced by a pale and sickly scalp, exposed to the ceiling. I can feel my heart shatter all over again as I see her struggle just to move her head to look over at us.

  “Hi there Lucy, I’m Maggie. It’s lovely to finally meet the girlfriend my son has told me so much about. Do you mind answering a few questions for me? I put a lot of work into raising Calvin right, and I want to make sure I did a good job.”

  I hate that even in this moment, I can’t keep a sly smirk slip onto my face as I recognize the look in my mom’s eyes: the look of mischief.

  “Of course Mrs. Xenos, anything.”

  “When you two have sex, do you finish?”

  I think I might have set a personal record for how fast my palm went from relaxed at my side to slapping my forehead.

  “God fucking damnit mom, why are you like this?”

  As mom starts laughing, the laughs quickly transform into a violent cough, but even that doesn’t take the smile from her face. She winks at me.

  “Couple more eunuchs for the pile eh? Also, I’m dead serious. Answer the question, young lady.”

  “Umm…” Lucy looks at me, the look in her eyes begging for help, but I just raise my hands in surrender. “Sorry, I can’t stop her, you’re just gonna have to answer.”

  “Uh, y-yeah. When we… uh… do it, I… uh… finish” by the time she is finished talking her voice is barely above a whisper. But the second her words end, I shove my fists in the air and yell at the top of my lungs.

  “WOO! FUCK YEAH! SHE CUMS!”

  As it feels like every nurse on the floor turns to look at us, Lucy gives me a look of utter betrayal.

  “Thank goodness. I’ve succeeded as a mother.”

  My dad, who is sitting beside mom’s bed, looks at Lucy with pity. “They’re always like this. You get used to it after a while.” Mom ignores him and turns to me.

  “I’m so proud of you Calvin, but considering how good your father is, I never had a doubt. I even asked him for a quickie last night. You know, grab a load for the road.”

  “OK VISIT’S OVER!” My dad rushes us out of the hospital as mom’s laughing coughs ring out behind us. Just before the door closes, mom shouts to Lucy. “Don’t break my son’s heart, ok? It’s fragile!” The image fades.

  That was the last time I ever saw mom.

  I opened the door to find Dad crying at the kitchen table. For the couple months after mom’s death, this had been a regular occurrence and especially unavoidable during the pandemic, but it’s been almost two years and a since then, so I am somewhat concerned.

  “Dad? What’s wrong?”

  Without speaking he pushes a letter over to me. I pick it up and glance over it, then freeze. It’s a letter from my dream college, the college Lucy got accepted to, Brown University, and it’s a letter of acceptance! For a second, I feel a flood of elation, but as I keep reading, my heart drops. I’ve been accepted, but my financial aid has been denied. Ever since mom died, we never financially recovered from the medical debts, and without a hefty amount of help, we will never be able to afford my tuition. Signs of our struggles are all around the house, from mold creeping in from the corners, to a notable lack of furnishing over most of the floor. The memories of my childhood seem miles away from this hollow reflection of what was once a bright and happy home. Forcing the tears off my face, I turn to dad.

  “Dad. It’s ok. It was a long shot anyway.”

  He gets up and wraps me tightly in a hug, burying his face in my shoulder. I’m almost as tall as he is now, at 6’3”, he is only two inches taller than me, but right now he seems to tower above me.

  “I’m so sorry Calvin. I failed you. I’m so, so sorry”

  Now I’m crying too, and I wrap him in a bone crushing hug of my own. We sit there for a while, just crying. Eventually, the image fades.

  The dreams continue. I see the summer when I move into Lucy’s apartment outside campus. I see the arguments, the glances, the silent pity in her eyes that she thinks I don’t notice. I see the night when I realise she doesn’t love me anymore. When all I see holding us together is how bad she feels for me. The moment when I decide it has to end. I see the relief on her face when I tell her. I feel the rage all over again, that it had to be this way. That I had to be the one to shatter this long expired love. I see my face as I storm out. I see the crash, feel the crunch, see the light go out in my eyes. Then it all starts over again. I live this cursed life what feels like a thousand times, but in that strange existence that one is in while dreaming, the passage of time never quite takes its toll on me. I am locked in an endless storm of life, love, and loss, with no change, no escape, until finally, finally, something changes, and I gasp awake.

  I find myself in a clump of rocky rubble, in a completely unfamiliar world. Twin suns stand solitary in a purple sky. Strange creatures that look like a cross between wolves and lizards, stalk at the end of a pink forest. Surrounding my head is what seems like millions of floating blue windows that fill my vision. For the first time in eons. I am awake, and my first words are exactly what you would expect.

  “WHAT THE FUCK!”