My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  * * *

  Blake and Kordell came over the next afternoon. Outfitted in electric blue jeans and a butter T-shirt, Kordell paused in the doorway, held up a six-pack of energy drinks and a monstrous bag of chips, and declared, “We’re going to teach you to dominate Mystics.”

  We settled into the living room, Kordell sitting against the wall, me and Blake on the floor against the couch. Blake was in another pair of inky, straight-leg trousers sitting low on her hips, plus a well-worn black grape T-shirt.

  She didn’t mention me texting her about the numbness, but I saw her watching me like she was making sure I was okay.

  Kordell pulled the decks out of Blake’s backpack and offered me one but Blake snatched it out of his hand. She said, “Kordi, don’t give her that deck. Lauren, swap with me and reshuffle. That deck plays too slow. And remember, don’t play in turn one unless you have something great.”

  They’d lectured me more than once about what the great cards were. It had to do with their cost to play compared to their attack and defense numbers. (I never knew math would be so useful in real life.)

  I shuffled my new deck, drew the cards for my hand off the top and looked at them. Or, rather, ended up staring at the sweet illustration on the shadow sorcerer card.

  “Hey, we finally got to infinities in math analysis class,” Blake said. She raised her face enough to look out of the top of her eyes. Her closed lips twisted in a smirk as wide as a grin. The effect was all nefarious mischief. “Or, as Roy says, ‘anal math.’ I don’t think they’re going to do transfinite numbers, though. It makes me sad.”

  “You know the kids can’t handle that shit,” Kordell told her. He was examining his cards, but one hand reached over to rest on Blake’s leg.

  “Trans-what numbers?” I asked.

  “Transfinite. The mathematics of infinities,” Blake said. “See, there’s more than one infinity.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked, half-distracted by the cards. “Isn’t it all just infinity?”

  “No,” she said with such emphatic joy that I looked up. Her face was shining, transformed from the wry smirk of a minute ago. Eyes wide, mouth-open smile. She went on, “There’s a smallest infinity. If you take all the counting numbers, like zero one two three and so on, that’s the smallest infinity but there are orders of infinity beyond that.”

  Kordell moved his hand to her wrist. “Blake, let Lauren play her card.”

  She jerked away from him, a flash of anger narrowing her eyes. Then she nodded at me, saying to Kordell, “Sorry.”

  Blake had more expressions in ten minutes than I did in a whole day. Was that from being bipolar? Did her face give an accurate map of an inner landscape I couldn’t even imagine?

  I felt tired from trying to keep up, but I wanted to go on watching her. I wanted to see how many expressions she had, to know what each one meant.

  We put down cards. Blake played aggressively while Kordell controlled and defended. I had more attacking cards than defending but I had to put up some defense so Blake wouldn’t steamroll me with her mutating monsters.

  After a few turns, I asked Blake, “Is your whole wardrobe black?” Quickly adding, “I’m sorry, that sounded rude.”

  “You have to work a lot harder than that to offend me,” she said, back to grinning. This grin was less wicked than her previous, more relaxed around the mouth. “It’s not. All black. I have a few blues and an orange. Just one. But mostly black.”

  That didn’t make sense. She didn’t strike me as somber, morose, emo, goth, whatever. Of everyone I’d met here, she laughed the most.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Because it’s easy and Einstein didn’t wear socks. Because of everything, and secrets, and we’re all going to die eventually.”

  As much as I wanted to ask about Einstein and socks and secrets, the part about death caught my whole attention. I thought about death much more than I ever wanted to. When I’d lie in bed at night and feel myself falling into the nothing of space, I’d think about the end of my life. I’d get sucked into thinking about the end of all things and drop into a bottomless pool of terror. What would it be like to walk around in all black, aware of death, maybe not so afraid of it?

  “What do you think happens when we die?” I asked. A slippery line of sweat formed between my fingers and the cards in my hand.

  Blake cocked her head and looked at me deeply, a darker silver in her blue-gray eyes. “I don’t think we can understand it because it’s orders of infinities. Kordi?”

  He lay down two defensive cards and said, “Last year I was playing this online game with a friend of mine—sharing an account. I had this character that I liked a lot and got pretty far in the game with. My friend decided to go hardcore. He changed the password and took the account and I could never log that character in again. For all I know, he deleted her. That’s what I think death is like.”

  He brushed his hand down the front of his chest and said, “This is my character. And someday I’m going to have to log out and go play another character.”

  “What logs out?” Blake asked. “A soul?”

  He said, “Infinities, right? Maybe we’re all souls logged into our characters or maybe we’re one infinite Soul playing all the characters.”

  I contemplated his hand resting on the bright blue of his jeans and my hand holding my cards. Could the same Soul underlie both of us? If we were all one Soul, would I lose my individuality when I died? Or was the Soul behind all of us so vast that each person’s uniqueness was preserved within it?

  I didn’t know how to ask any of that so I went with, “But all the suffering. Why?”

  Kordell lifted the hand I’d been watching, palm up toward the ceiling. “Maybe this game is only fun if you forget what you are. And maybe to do that you have to implement free will as a game mechanic. I don’t know. But I think when you’re in the game of life, the important thing is how you play it.”

  That sounded like what I’d learned at temple. The Rabbi never said much about an afterlife, all the focus was on this life and taking care of the people who needed it. Jenny never believed me when I told her we didn’t talk about an afterlife at temple. In her Christian worldview, it was incomprehensible that a whole group of people might not be obsessed with heaven and hell and belief. She couldn’t get why the words “faith” and “religion” were not synonyms.

  I said, “I wonder if part of the game is about repairing the world. If it’s messed up so that we have a lot of chances to make it better.”

  “Play,” Blake told me and her word hung in the air like the answer to everything: that if life is a game the answer is to play through it. Forget about college and corporate careers, about growing up and becoming someone I couldn’t stand. Forget it all and play.

  Then I realized she meant the cards I was clutching in my hand.

  I put down one of the two best that I could afford to play and Kordell nodded. “Good one.”

  We set down cards in a deepening, peaceful silence. Maybe this life was a character in a game and someday I would log out into another, bigger experience. I loved that idea.

  But what happened to that person I became when I logged out? To that Soul? Would she also die someday? What was outside of the larger reality? Where did it end and what happened when you got to the end?

  I came in second place in the Mystics game because Blake threw down many seriously aggressive monsters and wiped out Kordell. Of course after he was gone, she chewed through my army in two turns, but they said I should have bragging rights anyway.

  We were setting up a new game when the kitchen door slammed. Sierra crossed the dining room and threw herself onto the couch lengthwise behind me and Blake. (Torso by me, feet by Blake.) Her hair hung heavily at the sides of her face, damp with humidity, and I had a great view of the beads of sweat between her breasts. She was in another one of the sundresses, this one cut in a deep V with a skirt that flounced as she walked.

&nbs
p; She said, “The stupidity of some people. You would not believe the customers we had this afternoon.”

  Blake put a hand palm-down on the floor and worried a rough fingernail between two of the tightly-woven carpet ridges.

  “Really?” Kordell asked, glancing up from his cards and back down.

  “This guy must have been like fifty and he was huge and kind of gross, and I swear he ran into a display rack on purpose so he could watch me have to bend down and pick it all up. He stood there and watched me for like fifteen minutes and didn’t even help. Ugh, I feel like I need a shower.”

  But she didn’t get up. We played the next few rounds of the game. When she wasn’t drawing a card or putting one down, Blake dug a tiny trench in the carpet with her fingernail. Sierra sighed. Twice.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Would you get me a beer? I’m too hot to get up,” she said.

  I face-downed my cards and got her a beer from the now gloriously clean fridge. When I handed it to her, she caught my wrist and drew me down to kiss her. After a few seconds I pulled way. It’s weird to kiss in front of other people.

  I sat back in my spot and picked up my cards.

  Sierra sighed again. “You’re more into those cards than me,” she said.

  “No,” I started but didn’t know what to say because I did want to finish that game. It would have been obnoxious to sit around making out in front of Blake and Kordell who’d have to wait for me to play my card.

  “Where do you want to go for dinner?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. We could stay here and get pizza.”

  “How long are you going to be playing?”

  “Kordell said he’d teach me to win and I haven’t yet,” I told her. “Maybe one more game after this one?”

  “What am I supposed to do?” she asked.

  “We can deal you in,” Kordell suggested.

  Sierra flopped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Her fingers played with the end of one of my curls.

  Kordell set up an impenetrable blockade and in a few more rounds Blake and I were both defeated. They gathered up the decks and started shuffling.

  Sierra sat up. “I need a shower,” she said. “Lauren, come with me.”

  “I, uh, I could…but…” Showering with her was always fun but it seemed rude to do with Blake and Kordell there.

  “It won’t take that long,” she said. “They can play a game without you.”

  Kordell nodded slightly.

  Blake’s face was turned down and with Sierra behind her, only Kordell and I could see her frowning. But the sound of her expression carried in her voice as she told Sierra, “You two are girlfriends, we get it. You don’t have to monopolize Lauren every minute she’s here.”

  “Bitchy much,” Sierra said. She shoved off the couch and stalked into the bathroom.

  “We should go,” Kordell said.

  “Thanks for coming over,” I told them.

  Blake shrugged and boxed her deck. Her expression was closed. Not blank, but hard and shuttered, narrowed eyes emphasizing the planes of her cheeks. “Text me,” she said.

  After they’d left I got into the shower with Sierra because I could, because she was naked and cute, because she stared up at the ceiling and let me try things we hadn’t done standing up yet, because I didn’t want to fight. I wanted the water, her hands, and the hot steam all pressing on my skin.

  We ended up going out to dinner, to a cool sushi and robata place with wildly painted Munny figures on its walls and all the decor in red, black and bamboo. Sierra told me more about her day at work and the story about the guy knocking over the display again in detail. I nodded and laughed and wondered what I was feeling because I couldn’t begin to name it.

  Later, I lay awake in bed next to her staring at the darkened ceiling. The white glow of a streetlight filtered in around the blinds and sketched the contours of the room in charcoals. Would my life wash out someday like color at night? What did it feel like to be nothing?

  Blake had said that Zeno the character was afraid of being nothing inside—so was I. Even now I felt myself shredding away, turning colorless and empty. I put my mind inside the idea of Zeno. As nanites, could she become anything at all? How did it feel to be made of nanites?

  Maybe being Zeno felt like a small version of a great Soul inhabiting all the humans of the world. Maybe all her shapeshifting was an attempt to show the truth of Zeno—a truth that could never be static.

  Thinking about Zeno held the emptiness at bay, but I knew it wasn’t far off, lurking, waiting for me to let my guard down again.

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday night was the party at Bear’s parents’ house. Her family lived near a lake where we could swim, so I got a black high-necked swimsuit that afternoon while Sierra was at work. I packed the suit into my shoulder bag with my sketchbook, iPod, pens, pencils and miscellany. When Sierra got home, I watched her trying to determine the right suit to bring, which involved a lot of nice undressing.

  Then the house was full of people. Cyd was there with her new boyfriend, sitting at the dining room table. They were drinking wine and sharing a loaf of French bread that they tore into chunks and dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I wanted to sit with them but I’d be in the way.

  Roy showed up in knee-length khaki-colored shorts that I hoped were his swimming attire and feared were not. (Naked men and leeches topped my list of unacceptable lake creatures.)

  Blake wasn’t there. Disappointment and relief wrestled inside me. Kordell wasn’t there either. Were they together? If so, what were they doing? What was it like with Blake in bed? She probably directed everything, but who knows, maybe Kordell was less reserved once you got his clothes off.

  I rubbed my fingers over my eyelids to brush away those thoughts and went to sit next to Sierra. Dustin was there as usual, but he sat on the other couch and had a new girl with him: short, blond and heavy, with pink porcelain skin and a pretty mouth.

  “Lauren, this is Gabby. You’re not the new girl anymore,” he said. “She joined the story this week. She mostly writes music, so she’s going to compose the native songs of the Illudani.” To Gabby, he added, “Lauren is Sierra’s girlfriend.”

  I still loved how that sounded: girlfriend. That’s right.

  Gabby showed me the kind of shaky smile you give when you’re surrounded by weirdos and starting to suspect you’re one of them.

  “Welcome and all that,” I said. “It’s a fun group.”

  “Rule number one: don’t believe a thing Roy says,” Sierra remarked with a sharp laugh.

  Roy made a huff of protest. He was sitting on the other side of Gabby and she tried to shift away from him without looking like she was. That put her closer to Dustin, who failed to suppress a smile.

  “Sierra tells me you want Zeno to rescue Cypher,” Dustin said to me.

  I marshaled my arguments and presented them. “I think we’re going to need the other half of that artifact. We need Cypher to figure out where it is. If we have the whole artifact, the one that makes matter take its true form, we can use that on the High God, along with the weapon from the other universe. I think we’re going to need both so the High God can’t turn immune.”

  I held my breath.

  Dustin nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “I don’t think Solar’s going to make it easy for us,” Sierra said. “Are you, Roy? Or maybe Cypher will team up with Solar and go get the weapon.”

  “Not after he tortured her like that,” I said.

  “She might be into that,” Sierra replied.

  I remembered Blake saying it was gross, but I didn’t want to repeat that here. Blake and I had agreed we could tell each other anything and I felt like that put a blanket of confidentiality over all our conversations.

  “We should ask Blake,” Roy suggested. “Is she coming over?”

  Sierra answered, “She’s meeting us at the party. She’s staying the night at Bear’s
so she doesn’t have to bus home late.”

  Roy said, “We should go. When are we going over?”

  “Should head over around eight,” Dustin told him. “Swimming isn’t until near dusk. I’ve got to run by the liquor store and pick up some things.”

  “Lauren can take us over,” Sierra offered.

  “Sure,” I said. “But if we’re not going for a while, I have another question about the rescue. If Zeno’s the best thief in the galaxy, can’t she go steal Cypher?”

  “How’s she going to get out with Cypher’s body?” Sierra asked. “She’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “Well, Zeno’s a colony of nanites, right? So she could fly in there, copy Cypher’s body, take her place, send Cypher out in a disguise or even hide her somewhere while she recovers, and when Cypher’s out safe, Zeno could change forms again and leave.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Dustin said. “Roy, you have a counter to that?”

  “What if I put a chip in Cypher to track her?” Roy suggested.

  “Can’t I cut it out and absorb it into my copy of her body?” I asked.

  “Put it in her brain,” Sierra said.

  I turned sideways so I could see Sierra’s face. It was set in a doll-like half pout. She did not like the idea of Zeno rescuing Cypher.

  “Don’t you think Cypher’s been through enough already?” I asked.

  “Let’s skip the brain idea,” Dustin said. “If Zeno is going to cut a microchip out of Cypher and duplicate her, that’s a pretty good scene. I’m for it unless I hear better.”

  “You think that’s better than Cypher turning on us and going with Solar to get the weapon?” Sierra asked. “I don’t. It’s more dramatic the other way.”

  It was like Sierra was determined to pit Cypher against the Queen.

  “She could pretend to turn on us,” I suggested. “But plan to get the weapon and bring it to us.”

  So strange all of us arguing about Blake’s character and she wasn’t even there to say what she would do.

  Dustin said, “Let’s do both. Zeno goes to steal Cypher, does the stuff with the chip and all that, but Cypher tells Zeno to leave because Cypher’s going to join forces with Solar.”