...

Whose voice is this?

---

I don’t remember what time I got home, the path back leading through a haze of heat and exhaustion that turned everything into a blur until I finally got there. Muscle memory did the important work, until I knocked on the door once, then twice, then several times very quickly, not that that changed the result any. I was confident, even then, that Connor was going to sleep through the End, and no matter how hard or how many times I knocked on his door, I wasn't going to measure up to that. This hadn’t been the first time something like this had happened, and I was, thankfully, still awake enough to remember the backup routine.

An elevated railroad ran down the street, one that once brought things from the docks to the edge of town and back again, but was now – technically – derelict, with barriers barring any stairwell leading up to it, but it was an almost totally ambivalent condemnation, easily stepped over – literally – by anyone not completely intimidated by a chest-high fence that tipped over in the wind, with signage that had worn away to unrecognisability beneath time and graffiti. And from there, it was just a short walk up to the track, and then a long step over to the window I hadn’t bothered to close the morning before. As soon as I was inside and on my bed, I fell, and never stopped.

While I slept, I had the same dream that I would have every night, for the rest of my life. If you are who I hope you are, then you’ll already know what dream that is from the beginning all the way to the end, and if you aren’t, then we’ll have plenty of time to speak on it. At the time, the dream was incomplete, consisting entirely of the waiting room, the feeling of my fingers running through the velvet curtain that hung beside me, and the bodiless shadows lining the corridor on the way down to the entranceway to the room without doors. Each night that would follow, I would see a little bit more of the dream, be able to venture just that tiny bit further into it. I’ll tell you about it at the point where I reached the end of it. That’s the only time it mattered, anyway.

---

02 – dawn, los alamos

---

Was it Einstein that said that time is relative, or do I just assume that if a scientist said something, it was probably Einstein? I guess it doesn’t really matter who said it for very much longer. Or maybe I’m just saying that to make myself feel better about knowing exactly one scientist in the entire span of human history. Either way, it doesn't really matter who said it: if something is true, then people will find it eventually. I hope. Time is relative. It isn’t until much later that I understood why, and how, but I felt it, could see it happening, as soon as I dropped out of University and came back here.

It doesn’t seem that different at first. When you’re the one who has changed, when you are the one that has to adapt, you can do it, if you want. But unemployment has a kind of gravitational pull, an anchor tied around your ankle, and once you feel its pull long enough, you get unmoored from everyone else’s timeline. Without a schedule of work or school, without any way to distinguish between one day and the next, you find yourself sinking deeper into these long, dreary afternoons that last for weeks at a time, where nothing is happening, and even if there was, you’re not invited.

And then it gets longer. The afternoon keeps going, but everything outside your window moves faster and faster. Departures and weddings and breakups and stars going out, all rushing past that same afternoon, it’s arms wrapped tighter and tighter around you, whispering through serrated teeth about how lucky you are to even have this in these times.

All of which is to say: try not to judge me too harshly if I say that I woke up at 2pm in the morning. Time is relative, and mornings are too.

When I woke up I was still wearing that same suit, and the feeling of it; sodden with sweat that clung it tight to my skin like a cocoon, made me retch.My body was food that had been left out long enough for the flies to take an interest, and I sprung out of bed in a frantic effort to get it all off as best I could in given that the cramped room I was staying in. I think I hit my hands off the wall a few times, each time praying that it didn’t wake up Connor. After that, I rushed for the bathroom as quickly as I could, dry heaving into the toilet. Two fingers made to force themselves down my throat, but I bit down on them hard enough to catch the reflex. Instead, I climbed into the shower, hoping to finally wash off this feeling of intense wrongness that still clung tight to me even after leaving that suit behind.

When I moved back home, I didn’t move back home. Knowing that I would die in the same town I grew up in was already bad enough – I couldn’t stand the thought of dying under the same roof. Especially with my parents there. They found enough ways to make their presence – and disappointment – known, regardless.

Instead, I stayed with my cousin Connor. Connor was older than I was, and a disappointment to his parents in the same way that I was to mine, though mine rarely passed up the opportunity at have to observe that at least he had his own place. Maybe they’d change their mind about highlighting that if they knew he could afford it primarily through dealing drugs, but maybe not. Forward momentum is forward momentum, after all. If ketamine was how he fuelled his time travelling, who was I to judge? It seemed a lot healthier than whatever I had going on. My reflection in the mirror, with a black eye throbbing with a dull ache, couldn’t find muster the will to argue. As I dried my hair in front of the mirror and looked for my toothbrush hidden among Connor’s several, all I could muster in my own defense was that I came by my parents’ disappointment honestly, through hard work and countless squandered opportunities. Connor, on the other hand, cheated unapologetically, taking a shortcut out of his parents’ good graces by simply being inconveniently gay.

Connor was good enough to give me a place to stay “while I worked things out”, but we weren’t exactly close. I could hold a conversation with him, which is more than I could say for most of my family, but it was all a kind of shallow affect, never going any deeper than “How have you been lately?” or “Did you see that film?”. We knew each other, but we didn’t know each other. When we would meet up at the kind of annual family gatherings thrown by families that like the idea of being close more than actually being close, we would inevitably talk about the latest series of a sci-fi show that we were both watching, and it became something I looked forward to on these trips. But after college, when I moved in with him, I remembered asking him about what he had thought of the latest series of it, and I winced at the expression he made as he politely explained that he had stopped watching it some time ago, an expression that forced back a sense of disappointed surprise that I was still watching a show he had grown out of around the same time he had grown out of living with his parents. I thought about that show, as I got dressed, wondering whether or not there would be enough time left for it to get another season. It’s strange, the things that stick with you.

By the time I was out of the shower, dressed – in clothes that fit better than the suit but still hung a little loose – and downstairs, it was after 2pm in the morning but for Connor, it was still the dead of night, if the way he slept on the sofa was any indication. Seeing that sent an unpleasant chill through me, even though I had seen it at least a half-dozen times before. Throughout this entire half-alive morning routine that I had aggressively pursued, it hadn’t been interrupted once. It was a quiet, sedate, completely ordinary afternoon the likes of which I had become far too familiar with. I had been waiting for an aftershock, a reaction of any kind, to the bombing I had apparently survived the day before, but there was nothing. Nothing but the anchor around my ankle.

I sat down on the sofa next to Connor – as carefully as I could, despite the things that had been left on and around it. Connor was bad at chores. I was too, but there would eventually reach a point where the undone dishes and dirty ashtrays would become too much, and . This put me in an uncomfortable situation with Connor, who hated whenever I did them. If he caught me washing dishes, tidying the kitchen, or otherwise trying to busy myself, he would immediately leap to his feet and try to push me out of the way and do it himself. For someone who was otherwise definitionally laid-back, he would become angry, barking out aggressive, frustrated apologies that always made me feel uncomfortable. I was in no state to deal with this, so I just made enough space clear on the sofa to sit down without waking Connor up. I reached for the remote and switched the TV on, keeping my thumb pressed hard down on the volume switch as it buzzed into life, which wasn’t quite enough to stop a sharp burst of ClubLand to screech from it before dying down. I looked over at Connor, and I winced as I saw him stir.

The first time I roomed with Connor was on a one-night basis, at the last family gathering I ever attended – the last one I ever will, I suppose. I was officially too old to room with any of the girls, and so I was set up in the room Connor had in his parents’ house. I had left the party, such as it was, early, and was lying in his bed, idly channel surfing on the TV in his room, when he walked in, carrying a blue WKD in each hand and a cigarette between his fingers.

“What’s this you’re watching?” he asked.

“Nothing.” the me of back then said. “I’m just...flicking.”

He nodded, and sat down next to me. Together, we looked at Planet of the Apes without watching it. Mark Wahlberg was leaning in to kiss an ape when Connor asked “So, how’s Uni going?” between sips.

I changed the channel.

The relatively sedate sounds of a daytime talk show weren’t quite enough to stop Connor from stretching awake with a satisfied yawn. “What’s this you’re watching?” he mumbled, while rubbing his eyes.

“Nothing.” I said, quietly, and it was true. As soon as it became clear that whatever talk was happening on this show, it didn’t have anything to do with bombs in train terminals, I tuned out. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“’s fine. Should probably be up by now, anyway.” Connor said, stretching.

I changed the channel.

We were spared Mark Wahlberg’s turn to bestiality by scenes of unmasked police officers, back when they still had those, interrogating a bruised and bloody presumed-criminal. The sight gave me this anxious itch at the back of my neck, but I endeavored to keep it on for at least a little bit, out of fear that Connor might realise that I was uncomfortable, even if I didn’t know why I was uncomfortable. I took a sip.

“So, how’s Uni going?” Connor asked.

I couldn’t hide my irritation at hearing the same question I had been asked ad nauseum by everyone that night. “I told you already, man. It’s going fine.”

“Nah, I’m asking you for real this time. How’s Uni going?”

“And I’m telling you, for real, that it’s fine. It’s going fine.”

I changed the channel.

A news show was reporting on riots in the capital, blockades in far-off countries, and not on bombings happening in small towns. “I didn’t see you get home last night.” Connor observed.

“Yeah, I was...out late. Sorry about that.”

“It’s cool. Hope you had a good time.”

“...yeah.”

I could feel his eyes turn towards me as I changed the channel. Three men were trying to pull a car out of a ditch, and failing.

“That’s it? Just fine?” Connor asked.

“Yeah. Just fine. Is there a problem with that?”

Connor shrugged, then took another swig of blue. “All right. If you say so.”

I changed the channel.

This news anchor wasn’t talking about the bombing either. We were invisible to them, as stories of the affairs of far-off places that still held a sharpness to them bled through the screen. I went to change the channel again, but when I felt Connor’s eyes turn towards me, I flinched.

“Are you...looking for something specific?”

Yes, I thought. I am. I’m looking for someone, anyone, to tell me that what happened yesterday was real. I know it happened to me, but that doesn’t mean it happened to anyone else, and I need it to.I need to see that it’s left a scar on other people, to see the looks of distant, false concern on a news presenter’s face, interviews with scared and hurt people. I want to see bodies in the wreckage, the blood on their fingers drying in the morning sun. I want it very, very badly.

“No. Sorry.” I said, quietly. “Were you watching something?”

Connor shook his head, and stretched, rubbing some sleep out of his eye. “Nah. I should probably start getting ready. Meeting someone later.”

I nodded, and went back to watching the scrolling headlines on the bottom of the screen, while Connor stood up and went to the kitchen counter.

“How did the interview go?” he asked.

I changed the channel.

“South Park!” Connor said excitedly, as he took another swig. I couldn’t really muster the same enthusiasm, and sat on the bed nursing my bottle in silence, stewing in my frustration and discomfort, until I finally voiced it.

“What did you mean by all that?”

“By what?” Connor replied, the mock confusion in his tone bristling against me.

“You know what I mean, man. Asking me how Uni was going.”

“...just was hoping to have a conversation, dude.”

I pulled myself further back into the headboard. “I’ve been telling everyone about that shit all night.”

“Yeah, I heard. I’m a good listener.”

“Then why do you need to hear it again?”

Connor shrugged. “I guess I’m just wondering when you’re going to drop out.”

I stepped off the bed, knocking the remote to the ground. “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked. I felt a lump at the pit of my stomach begin to crawl into my throat as I stood, while Connor sat there, and let out a tiny laugh.

“Just making conversation, man.” I felt my fist clench. “Everything ok?”

I shook my head, and tried to concentrate on Connor, as he lay on his bed drinking his Blue WKD and making his coffee at the kitchen counter.

“I think I need some fresh air.” I muttered, and walked towards the door, my head feeling upleasantly light, like it was detached from all of my limbs, that were only reluctantly still following the orders from my brain.

Connor laughed and shook his head. “I would have thought you’d have learned to handle a bit more alcohol than that after nearly a year of Uni. If you haven’t been studying and you haven’t been curing your chronic light-weightedness, what have you been doing this whole time?” He said something else after that, something I don’t remember. I do remember what I did, back then. I told him to fuck off, and locked myself in the bathroom. I waited there as long as I could, waiting out what remained of Connor’s energy so that I could go back in and get to sleep without another word from him, without any more conversation wrapped in the barbed wires of interrogation. I stayed there for what felt like a very long time, only leaving when, an aunt knocked on the door and asked when I would be done in here, and so, I was. I walked, slowly, back to Connor’s room, and felt my heart sink when I saw the light still seeping out from under his door. I came back in, and lay down next to Connor, watching a different show on the TV.

“...are you, like...high, or something?” Connor asked.

I shook my head. “No, just...a little tired. I didn’t get much sleep.”

He nodded. “I asked how the interview went.”

“...it went fine.”

He nodded, slowly, and I felt the weight of it around my throat. I turned, slung my bag over my shoulder, and left, the noise of what sounded like South Park cutting out as I shut the door behind me.

---

In high school, at least once a year, someone called a bomb threat into the school, usually around exam time, funnily enough. We were the exact right age for it – too young to actually remember the war, but old enough to still feel it, from the jagged edges it left on our parents and the world around us, edges that any teenager will grow into and learn how to press against. A phone call was all it usually took, but if you really wanted to skip out on a few classes, it was almost insultingly easy to make a finer point: take a cheap rucksack, fill it with a few rocks, toss it underneath a teacher’s car, and boom: a “credible threat”. Everyone gets evacuated, the police are called, empty out the sack, and everyone heads back in a couple hours later. Most of the time, whoever did it wouldn’t even get caught. At every step of the process, everyone – the students, the teachers, the cops - knew exactly what was happening, but every step still had to be followed as if this hadn’t happened a hundred times before. It was normal, even if I knew that not every place in the world experienced something like this. Normal is just the word we use for whatever we’ve gotten used to.

One day, in my last year, we were called into the gym for an emergency assembly. Every pupil crammed into that too-small hall, guessing about what this could be about, gloating about missing a class, or, in the case of my friend Siobhan and I, commiserating over being deprived our shared free period.

Eventually, the principal appeared, silently announcing that everyone had to be quiet now. The severe expression on his face struck a chord with me, and my mind wandered to the last time I saw him wear a look like this, briefly wondering if he was here to announce that a student had died. Why was the routine for holding Mass or announcing that a teacher would be retiring have the same ceremony as that? Why was all of this so utterly normal?

I remember feeling like that, on the bus to the Terminal. It was late, but it was a painfully ordinary kind of lateness, and it’s arrival stung like a wasp, and I began for the first time to truly doubt what had happened yesterday. How could the buses still be running the day after a bomb went off at the station? But even then, I couldn’t be sure. If people can get used to all kinds of “normals”, then surely buses can, too. When a cop got on board at one stop, the tightening in my chest and the ache in my head told me that I’d have to get used to another normal myself, where they were concerned. I kept my head down and avoided antagonising them, but couldn’t stop myself from glancing in their direction more often than I should have. Each time, it felt like they were staring right back at me, but then, they always did that. It was their masks. It was normal. There was no reason to assume that last night had changed anything, that they were looking at me, specifically, that entire trip. No reason at all.

By the time I had managed to shake myself free of this particular thought, the Bus was pulling into it’s terminus. Looking on the outside of it from the bus window, it looked just as it always had, just the same as when I took this same bus here the previous morning, but whether it was me or the building or both, there was a feeling in the air that was unmistakably different. The huge window panes that made up most of its outer shape no longer seemed to absorb heat, the way I assumed they were designed to, but reflected it, making the air around it even hotter than normal, and rendering the glass itself opaque beneath the oppressive glare of the sun.

I felt my breath quicken, and a shiver run down my arms as the bus finally came to a stop, and the few remaining passengers began to disembark. Despite longing to see what was inside those glass walls more than I had wanted anything in what felt like years, I found myself unable to move, unable to stand up in my seat, let alone get off the bus. It wasn’t until the driver yelled that the bus had stopped that I finally snapped to my feet and walked hurriedly down, my fear of social ineptitude briefly overcoming my nameless fear that I wouldn’t find what I was expecting to here. The cop – who was still standing near the doors, holding onto a bar like the bus was still in motion – watched me, the whole time, even as I thanked the bus driver and stepped off. I hurried in the direction of the queue inside, trying to keep my heart from my throat as I heard the heavy footfalls of a pair of boots behind me.

On the assembly hall’s stage, our principal cleared his throat, and tried to stand up straight, which, given that he was a tall, skinny man who carried himself like his limbs were attached to his body at all the wrong angles, left him out of range of the microphone. In the strange, distant voice that resulted, he told us that a student had not, in fact, died, but that we wouldn’t be seeing them anymore, regardless. Barbara Fitzgerald, Year 11, Class 4, had been indefinitely suspended after being found responsible for calling in a fake bomb threat a couple weeks before.

I don’t know how she got caught, when so few other people did. Maybe it was the way phones are now, maybe she just got unlucky. At the time, I thought it was a fluke. But as time went by, and their never came another unexpected call to assemble and evacuate the school, or a bus turned away from the gates by an exasperated cop, it became clear that I now lived in a new normal, a new way-things-were, one more uncomfortable and stifling for my existence from the last. We still had days off, obviously, but only the structured ones, or the ones I clawed out for myself via careful application of hot towels to simulate fevers. But I had come to crave, to rely on, the unexpected relief that those days offered, seeming to come just when I needed them. When I confided in my parents about this, they reacted with a confusion that alarmed me. This, they told me, was the the kind of world that they had wanted to live in their whole lives, a world where people wouldn’t be afraid of a constant spectre of violence, of random missile and bomb attacks emerging from nowhere. I tried to explain that it wasn’t real, that unlike during the war, no one ever got hurt, and no one ever died. That the people who had died weren’t dying from schoolbags filled with chains placed in strategic positions, but their confusion rose to anger, then. I didn’t understand why, then, and we had a pointless argument about it that seemed very important in that moment.

I think I get it now, though.

I didn’t know the last girl to ever call in a bomb threat to our school. She was enough years below us to be an immature child as opposed to us fully-realised Year 14 adults-in-waiting. But I still remember her, like afterimages trailing behind me, long after I had forgotten the name of the principal that expelled her. And I remember the feeling of her absence, even if it only ever existed in my head.

---

The air I stepped into was thick with a heavy, damp heat, as if the atmosphere of the station had been swapped with that of a greenhouse. Indeed, that would almost have seemed to have been the case. The little bits and pieces of greenery that I would have seen throughout the Terminal – even the ones that I thought were, or in fact were, false or plastic – seemed to have grown beyond their pots and beds, not so much that they were uncontrollable, but undoubtedly beyond what would be considered appropriate for a smattering of tasteful greenery for visitors, who I imagined would think even less of the insects crawling and buzzing around these installations. The people here – perhaps less than a busy day, but no different from a standard one – seemed to be steering clear of the plants for this reason, but in almost every case it seemed unconscious, routine, as if this flora and fauna was a routine part of their commute and had not simply appeared yesterday. Almost immediately, my thoughts turned inward. I was seeing things, surely? Anyone else would notice the dramatic transformation this place had undergone, and yet, if they had, they showed little sign. I tried my best to pull myself together, to avoid looking as if I was a tourist staring dumbly at everything around them, but the sickly heat around me made me increasingly uncomfortable. I kept moving towards the central concourse, my eyes looking through the crowd for signs of masks or pale hair.

Maybe it was that focus that delayed my noticing of the more striking transformations the Terminal had undergone. The windows of the entire building had vanished since yesterday, but the glass had not. Instead, it had become polished to an unnatural sheen that the building resembled less a a sleek, modern palace of windows as it did a vast, wide hall of hall of mirrors, duplicating every person walking past them such as to give the impression of enormous crowds, bigger than the building could possibly hold. Said crowds seemed to find this, too, wholly unremarkable, though there were at least a few kids playing with the mirrors, not that that was enough to assure me that I wasn’t suffering a hallucinatory break from reality. I kept moving, navigating myself by the foot traffic of those around me rather than the mirror-covered halls, rendered wholly unfamiliar despite their layout not seeming to have changed substantially. It wasn’t until I arrived at the food court that I felt like I had some bearing of where I was, but it was here, with the glass dome reaching out to the sky, that it became undeniable just how much this place – or my senses – had transformed. The central concourse had expanded, stretched out in every direction, growing new walkways that bridged the vast distances between itself. New hallways and floors that had never been now were, filling a space that was far, far larger than the Terminal had ever been, and, indeed, that it had been on the outside. The sounds of trains echoed through the place as if it were a cathedral, the noise of wheels grinding against rails growing deafening. And throughout it all, the mirrors stretched on and on, turning every direction into a horizon made of people that seemed to stretch on forever, twisting upwards through the dome above that my vision followed until I looked up into the centre of the dome above, a spiral made up of myself set at uncomfortable angles. And at the centre of it, the Sun, visible only through a construction of tiny mirrors designed to dampen its effect, but clear, all the same, and closer than I had ever seen it.

I felt sick, sicker the longer I stared up, but I couldn’t look away. I was as if I had never left the interrogation room in the police station, or the interview room from yesterday, it had only gotten bigger and bigger around me, as if it was eating all that was left of the world. Soon, all that would remain of all existence would be this stagnant room, left to burn in the approach of the sun. I stood there, my gaze fixed directly up, only half-aware of the images of figures in gas masks approaching my own in all the mirrors.

In the thick of exam season, huddled in the shade with Siobhan, each of us had stopped pretending we were still paying attention to the books we were supposed to be studying. You have to understand, things were different then. 35 degrees celsius was considered hot back then, and neither of us had adapted to working in that kind of heat.

“...what did you say?” Siobhan asked me, when I had stared at a sentence for a minute straight and been unable to process any of the words. Her saying that was the first indication that I had said anything at all.

“...I need someone to bomb the school again, already. I think.” I wasn’t sure that is in fact what I said, but it was what I was thinking.

She looked up at me, staring through narrowed eyes, as if what I said had revealed me as some kind of impostor wearing my own skin. “You think?” she said, pronouncing the word as if it was wholly unfamiliar.

“I think that’s what I said, yeah.”

“No, I mean…” She shook her head, took out the piece of gum she was chewing (a fireball? Seriously?) and stuck it under the desk. “You need someone to bomb the school again?”

From across the room, a few sharp raps from the librarian’s desk and a point in our direction sent Siobhan’s face red with embarassment, and she tried her best to refocus on her textbook. I shrugged. “Wouldn’t you rather be not-studying at home instead of not-studying here?” I said, just above a whisper.

Without raising her head from her book, Siobhan shook her head. “What’s that got to do with the school getting bombed?”

I opened my mouth, expecting an explanation to be forthcoming, but finding none. I felt suddenly self-conscious, and searched around for something that was not Siobhan to look at, but did not immediately make it obvious that I was avoiding Siobhan, and landed on the library window, looking out over the grass hill leading up to the school, the greys and reds of the city beyond the rusted gates, and above that, in the glass, a half-faded image of someone standing in an unfamiliar palace of mirrors, with a man in a gas mask approaching them from behind.

As off-putting a decorative choice as they were, the mirrors did let me see that much, at least. Carefully, I scanned the surrounding mirrors, seeing in them what looked like the same policeman in the same clothes in different places, all around me, pushing through the throngs of people with purpose, towards me. I walked forward, as calmly as I could, avoiding, as best I could, offering any clue that I was aware of their presence.

My stomach churned, my throat tightened and my ears rang with the sound of bells inside and out. The need to see what the bomb had done, the need to know what it had done, to know that I wasn’t insane and that what had happened to me really happened, my need for it to have happened...all of it was all-consuming. All of it was what kept me going, one foot in front of another, towards the pool of pebbles, that I wanted to find incinerated, charred and broken, scattered all through the concourse, and the cracked, black glass sculpture and the frescoes within, shattered beyond recognition, and behind that, two black shadows, stained on the back wall. His, and mine.

Instead, when I finally got there, there was nothing at all.

The first time it ever happened – the first time a bomb threat let us out of school – I remember so clearly. We were asked to assemble in our assigned classes and groups. For the youngest like us, there was still a degree of urgency and import about the whole thing that had long been drained out of the older students, and even then was undermined by the bored, lackadaisical manner of the teachers, idly chatting and sharing cigarettes while we assembled in numbered columns in the school car park, as was standard procedure in the event of a fire drill. This was despite the potential issue posed by the very rucksack that had been used to give the threat it’s illusion of credibility, hastily stuffed under the car of a particularly unpopular chemistry teacher.

It was different, to be sure. The black glass sculpture was gone, and the pebbles around it with it. Instead, they had left a gap, a gap that was filled with a small reflecting pool, one that blended in seamlessly with the architecture around it, now tying it together such that it no longer looked and felt like an endless kaleidoscope of reflective glass, but a tasteful use of mirrors, one that showed the cops I thought were following me walk past and off on purposes that had nothing to do with me. If this was scar tissue, it was healing that had obscured the scar itself so completely that it might never have been there. And in its waters, I saw tears begin to stream down my face.

After my first university exams, I commiserated with my friends at the smoking area of a club we all thought was the coolest place we had ever been in because it was the first place we could get into that wasn’t desperate or predatory enough to let in pubescent acne-ridden teenagers to fill out the night’s clientele, In particular, one of our number, Charlie, had sped far ahead of us in said commiserations, and was downing her fifth WKD around the time Siobhan and I were starting on our thirds.

It was the person in the queue behind me who spotted it, whistling to get the attention of his friend just ahead of me in the queue. Said friend turned back, and then towards the car that his friend jerked his head towards, and then laughed.

“Oh my god. Seriously?”

“I know, right?”

“These teachers are so stupid.”

“So stupid.”

Because I didn’t want it to just be different. Yes, clearly something had happened, and I could take solace in that, even it felt increasingly clear that whatever had happened was far more likely to have happened with me than it did with the rest of the world. No one else regarded this as different or strange in any way. The only strange about the reflecting pool was the person silently sobbing into it.

With more bravery than I had in me, Charlie went over every single mistake she now knew she made in the lead-up to the exam, every formula misunderstood, every function mistakenly applied. Charlie had actually ended up doing fine, if I remember right, but in that moment, she felt like she had fucked up University at the very first hurdle.

What I wanted was a ground zero. The kind they showed on TV in places were things happened. I wanted smoke, and fire. I wanted debris and destruction, I wanted cracked walls and collapsed ceilings. I wanted a wound, still raw and bleeding. I wanted something that would make people scream, something that would make them realise that something had gone wrong, that something was wrong with everything.

“Fuck it!” she said, slamming down her empty eighth bottle of WKD. “Fucking...I don’t know. They store the papers somewhere, right? We can just...we can just...go in there and…” She made an indefinable gesture with her hands that her eyes found as baffling as Siobhan and I did. “…change all the wrong answers to right ones.”

“We absolutely cannot do that.” Siobhan said.

They laughed, and a teacher hushed them. But as soon as the teacher was distracted, they started talking again.

“What would you do if it was real and it went off?”

“Hide behind you.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Then the fire and stuff would just get you, and I’d be fine.”

“You traitor!” There was a note of genuine upset in the kid’s voice, then. Maybe I just imagined it. “Well, then I’d just hide behind you!”

“No way. I’m a million times faster than you.”

I want police sirens and ambulances. I wanted panic and screaming. I wanted what had happened to me last night to be happening to everyone, I wanted this to be a national fucking emergency, because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? The entire world staring down the barrel of a gun that it pretends not to see. Why wouldn’t they see? Why weren’t they screaming?

“I knowwwwwww.” Charlie groaned. “But imagine if we could. Wouldn’t you?”

Siobhan, who, unlike Charlie and I, breezed through the first half of the semester with the infuriating quiet confidence who seemed to regard University as a place that one went to study, shook her head. “Fuck no.”

Charlie’s eyes, with some effort, met mine - which were starting to feel the effect of the fourth WKD that I was rapidly sipping in lieu of contributing to the conversation – and she grinned. “I know you would.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” I said, interjecting into their debate in a way they were immediately, visibly, offended at, but I felt, with massively misplaced confidence, I was uniquely suited to solving, having recalled something similar from a film my dad had shown me “If that happened, it would still get you, I’m pretty sure. It’d get all of us. We’re too close to run away or hide or anything. There’s nothing we could do. We’d all just die.”

I wanted to know if what had happened to me was real. But the truth was that I already knew that what happened to me was real in every way it mattered. I felt it in my bones in my head. What I really, truly wanted, from the moment I woke up this morning, was for everybody else to feel that too. For the crowd in the terminal, and the crowd outside, to be forced to stop their comings and goings and their jobs, and feel what I felt. I wanted them all to die.

I tried to shrug non-committally, and failed spectacularly. Unlike Charlie, who faced what she believed to be her failure head on, I shrank from it, humiliated by how badly I knew I had done on those exams, how incapable I was to focus on anything that was in front of me. “You’d just get caught. They’d...they’d just see that you changed your own answers. No, you gotta get rid of the evidence. All of it. The papers, yeah. But also the teachers. They gotta die, too.”

While I stared out of the middle distance through three pairs of eyes, five others stared back into mine. Four of those were in places and times away from here, further than the stars but close enough to feel their breath on the back of my neck. The fifth, proud, but tired, above hanging, dark bags, sat on the other end of the wall bordering off the pond that now, looking just the same as I remembered them from the day before.

---

“Back to the scene of the crime?” the boy from yesterday said, turning to me and giving a smile that held my chest in a vice grip, while wagging his finger in a mock gesture. “I've heard that one should never ever do such a thing as that.”

“What crime?” I heard myself say. “There’s nothing. Nothing happened. It’s just me.” I shrank into myself, my head falling into my hands. "I'm just losing it."

He shook his head. “You just don’t see it yet.” He paused, stood up, and stretched, as if he had just spent the last day sleeping here, He turned away, and my heart leapt into my throat in that moment, and on reflex, I stood up. But he looked back over his shoulder, his smile still pulling me forward on an invisible strong. “Would you like to? Would you like to see the crime? Would you like to see the body?” he asked.

I promise you, I meant to just nod. But the dam inside me had long since cracked, and the question sprung free before I could stop it.

“Who are you?”

His eyes, widened with surprise, and I felt the heat from yesterday zero in on my cheeks. And then he laughed, gently, almost without any sound at all, but what sound there was I wanted to capture in a bottle and keep it inside for as long as I could.

“Call me Ré.” he said, and I did.