While The Player Sleeps

by Scott Tierney

  Some inhabitants imagined that The Player, upon each departure, would simply lay still on His bed and remain in a state of sleep until He decided to reawaken; others had formulated that His body would disappear entirely, only to phase back into reality when He returned for another session. The second of these scenarios appeared to be the most accurate – right before the band’s obscured eyes and The Brother’s judgemental gaze, The Player’s unconscious form began to fade away as though a cloud of ashes from an extinguished fire.

  Yet, defying the band’s expectations, He did not vanish entirely.

  At the very moment when The Player was little more than a watermark upon the bedsheets, His body gradually began to reassemble – albeit in a less exact guise than before.

  Enraptured, the band dared to ease the wardrobe’s doors a fraction wider apart, scarcely able to comprehend what they were witnessing.

  Pixel by pixel, The Player continued to materialise on the bed; moments later, His entire body had fully returned, outstretched and solidified in the same resting position as before.

  But to the band’s bewilderment, He did not return in the exact form they had expected. In comparison to earlier, The Player now seemed shorter, puffier, His bone structure and complexion altogether conflicting. He seemed like...someone else?..

  With a hand over their mouth for fear that their gasps would be detected, one of the band recognised this person now in The Player’s place.

  It was one of the overseers.

  His expression fixed with a dry contempt for the figure now occupying the bed, The Brother nonetheless offered the overseer a hand and yanked him up. At The Brother’s behest, the overseer spoke with a naked and fragile timidness, offering words of apology for his performance. On The Brother’s part there were further chastising remarks, fingers jabbed in the overseers chest and angry condemnations regarding his mimicry during today’s session – but the dressing down was abruptly cut short when the most enraged of the band, incapable of restraining their abhorrence, burst from the wardrobe and took hold of the overseer by the throat.

  Before either The Brother or the others in the wardrobe could react, the inhabitant was striking at the overseer relentlessly, swinging at this false idol with wild and berserk punches which landed with a sickening hollowness. It was only when the overseer’s form suddenly transmuted back into that of The Player that the inhabitant momentarily refrained from his beating.

  From his knees, The Player looked up at his attacker with an expression which pleaded for pity, hands together in a desperate and snivelling appeal for reprieve – yet this incredulous act only sickened the inhabitant further. With the arc of a lightning bolt he threw down a punch which smashed a fist-sized cluster of pixels from The Player’s jaw, revealing the imposter’s gaping mouth underneath.

  By now The Brother had regained his senses enough to intervene – before the band could restrain him, he grabbed hold of the attacking inhabitant and threw him back across the room with the full force of his build. Before the inhabitant had even landed, The Brother was berating him for his insolence and his defiling of the city’s most strongly held beliefs.

  How dare he strike The Player! The Brother screamed at the inhabitant while helping said Player to his feet. Were there no limits to his despicable blasphemy?

  Despite the assertiveness in which The Brother delivered these remonstrations, the band, understandably, remained unconvinced – this overseer, this imposter, this devil with wings, was not The Player!

  Oh, but The Brother begged to differ. This was The Player.

  At least it was in the eyes of anyone outside of this room...

  Such was his matchless authority, The Brother explained through the coil of a maniacal grin that he could easily have had this puny band exiled from the city with a merest whistle to his overseers – but never let it be said, despite the unfavourable light in which this band had so unjustly painted him, that The Brother was beyond reasoning...

  With their attention fixed, The Brother put forward a quandary: Would they, this band, be content with living in a city perpetually congealed within a slime of despondency? A city sapped of its will, its meaning, its direction, its purpose? A city where the gloomy inhabitants, riddled with glitches as though a colony of lepers, were so depressed that they could not find the strength to slither from their beds each morning, let alone prevent the city itself from falling under the same spell of inertia?

  Or would they rather it be the case, The Brother offered with an unfurling of his hand, that every inhabitant were given a purpose? Would that situation not be preferable to the destructive chaos which erupts from nihilism?

  These questions The Brother posed without any inclination towards the buckled overseer shielded behind him, half his battered face peeking out from behind that of The Player’s mask. Instead, with all the glory of a preacher, The Brother threw out his arms and proclaimed:

  My friends! My fellow inhabitants! Would it not be beneficial – nay, compassionate – that all of us in this magnificent city be blessed with a reason to exist?

  Even if that reason was nothing more than a fraudulent illusion? the band returned.

  The Brother smiled with a confidence underlying his reasoning. Rather than deliberate with them any further, he considered it more profitable to let the band themselves provide the answer to the dilemma they had posed.

  And may the fallout of such an answer lay directly at their feet, he so warned...

  Had there been ample time, the band would doubtlessly have weighed the pros and cons of this impossible predicament between themselves until the sun had again risen – but any such debate was halted by a happening from the opposite corner of the bedroom.

  Seized by a bewilderment, the band, the semi-costumed overseer and The Brother spun around on their heels and turned their attention to the bed. Gradually, like a venting of steam from a shallow grave, a ghostly form began to assemble on the sheets.

  This time there was no argument towards the identity of the figure now solidified on the bed:

  It was The Player...

  He rose to His imperious height. Slowly, without speaking, He turned and faced those who had invaded His dwelling, who themselves were gripped at the knees by both terror and shame.

  With a questioning expression, He cast His gaze across the band, the brother – and then to the mangled replica of Himself. This creature before Him – for that was the distinction which The Player’s expression implied – He studied inquisitively as though sniffing inside a bottle of sour milk. He stared down on His sheepish copy, through it, beyond it, seeking eye contact which the overseer was incapable of reciprocating.

  As though considering an overgrown terrain which needed to be scrubbed, The Player then looked passed the overseer and to the bedroom window, drawing His eyes across the cityscape beyond. This He did for a prolonged and indeterminable period as though weighing an enormous decision – all the while the band, the overseer and the brother stood motionless with faces lowered to the floor, awaiting His verdict.

  Without a second glance, The Player turned His back on the inhabitants for a final time.

  Then He suddenly, instantaneously, disappeared.

  The bedroom immediately became darker, as though the lights had been dimmed. The floor trembled. There came a happening on the horizon...

  Huddling around the window, all in the bedroom watched in horror as a darkness of absolute impenetrability swelled over the skyline like a tsunami of oil. Under its shadow, every light in every building was snuffed out, every vehicle ground to a halt, and every inhabitant froze. The buildings themselves were then swallowed up in the wash, erased as though equations scrubbed clean from a blackboard in a single wipe. The moon and the stars vanished soon after, leaving nothing but darkness in their place. Not even sound itself escaped the darkness’ deletion, for the city was
soon muted.

  It seemed He had arrived at His verdict...

  The black wave gathered pace, wiping roads and streets and cars and bodies from existence, the entire city lost to the darkness as though a terrain beyond the reach of a lighthouse’s beam. The pinnacle of this beam, those in the bedroom soon realised, was the mansion – but that itself was soon engulfed and digested from the outside in, the bedroom window and the view beyond it suddenly vanquished.

  The bedroom grew darker still, seemingly shrinking in spite of a lack of discernible walls. The remaining inhabitants desperately retreated into the centre of the room where the last of the light survived. But not for long – the light inevitably shrunk down to a single disc on the floor, and the brother, the overseer and the band, despite clinging to one another, were lost forever to the darkness.

  Then there was nothing.

  Then, following a short pause, there was light.

  And then everything within the city was reset to as it had originally stood.

  There would soon arrive the first bus.

  And a new Player.

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