[Where would you like to receive mail?]
[※ Note: You can only choose once]
[Home]
[➤ Pants Pocket]
I clicked on [Pants Pocket].
The feeling was rather unlike the sensation of clicking a computer mouse. Far from it, actually. It felt like touching egg whites or some slime formed from white glue and activated with borax. Not as sticky, though. And it left some residue on my fingers.
[You have received your compensation]
[4000 points have been deposited]
[You have mail]
The Federation's first floor was rowdy. Johnny had begun showing off his new sword by slashing in the air and pretending to slice Art with it. Harry laughed.
There was an icon of an envelope on the corner of the screen.
Preparing myself for the icky sensation it gave, I pressed it.
A voice entered my mind.
—Prologue
—Reverie Schneider had always been somewhat of a ghost, unknowing to himself and others.
"Huh…?"
The words felt stuck in my mouth.
Confusion was an understatement.
As though narrating my story, the male voice continued to speak of things even I do not remember.
The memories came back to me. The way it entered my mind's system was like being hit by a plane.
—When the first cell tower had been built, every citizen of his city was overjoyed. But not Reverie, no, for he had just witnessed his mother…
"Stop!"
Everyone halted whatever they were doing to look at my outburst, my mess of a self.
All the screens that had been in front of me ceased to exist, as if it had never been there. As if there was no such as the rounds. As if the world had always been like this, as if The Federation tower and its citizens had always lived here.
As if…
It was a world where I didn't exist.
—Dearest audience,
The voice remained in my head, ringing from the silence.
—You have to understand this.
Silence.
It was as if it was quiet and noisy all at the same time.
I remained floating in an abyss of stories.
—The fact that Reverie Schneider never claimed to be kind.
My story, most of all.
—In fact, he who is named Reverie Schneider has always been a piece of shit.
Shut up, shut up.
—People always spoke behind his back with words like…
—Two-faced, sociopath, people-pleaser.
I'm not like that.
—But Reverie only wanted to be kind to others, but never himself.
—He says he wants to remain lonesome and yet always butts in on other people's problems.
—This trait of his had existed long before the death of his mother or his elder brother, even if he always claimed that it hadn't.
I couldn't move a limb, as though I was inside a coffin, about to be buried, with my blood drained, my face made.
—He can't even tolerate himself.
—So how could he possibly have comrades?
-
An unfamiliar ceiling, I noted unnecessarily when I awoke.
Moving my head from each side, I was inside a room with whitewashed walls that was impossibly bare.
They need to fire their interior designer.
In an attempt to stand, I groaned and fell to the cold linoleum floor.
I heard an array of steps towards the door of the small room.
But my body was sore to the point it hurt when I even tried to stand.
The door opened.
"Junhan," I said as I attempted to scramble off the floor.
Junhan wore all white clothing as she entered, her hair still straight. It made me wonder if her hair would curl when she got angry, the same way curly-haired folks did.
She strided along as if she hadn't heard me.
At last, without needing the help of the indifferent Junhan, I pulled myself up to the bed.
"Where am I?" I asked.
Junhan ignored me once again.
She placed a computer on the table before her, a finger gliding on the touch pad.
"What happened to me?" I asked again.
She continued to shut her mouth and had booted up a game.
The rhythmic squeaks of a laser-shooting alien game reverberated on the walls of this completely colorless room.
It befitted someone like Junhan, this room.
I was about to ask some more when she finally looked at me—with a sharp glare and striking the table as she did. There was only the sound of the game's background music.
"Don't you ever shut up?"
A strange statement to an introvert like me. People always asked if I ever opened my mouth or if I was even capable of speaking.
"Well, I would've," I said, "if you had answered. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, now, that's just annoying."
"How could I possibly fool you when I had yet to say a word?"
She turned her head away and went straight into the game again.
There was an uncomfortable silence that always seemed to happen when Junhan was around.
I was the first to break it.
"What happened to me?" I said, my voice low and steady.
"You collapsed, is all. Nothing big."
"Oh."
I had an urge to press my chest again and see if that voice would appear again, but I also had a fear of it.
I've never been forgetful.
And still, there is a void in my memories. I remember parts, of course: my mother's death, my brother's suicide, my time at a mental ward, and…Archie's betrayal. That much I could recall.
But there was something I should not have forgotten.
What was it?
I looked around further and comprehended what this place was.
Out of the room I went with sudden strength. I did not bother to care for my aching legs.
Whitewashed walls with signs of aging, long hallways with multiple rooms on either side, a broken door knob that is akin to my memories of a raging patient's outburst.
The ceiling wasn't familiar because I had never been a patient.
"This is the hospital I worked at."