New Decameron Thirty-Five: John Chu (Patreon)

Selected Afterimages of the Fading

by John Chu

A row of dumbbells sorted by weight, ranging from pointless to respectable, sits in a rack against one wall. A squat rack and the tree of plates next to it stands against the opposite wall. Assorted benches, flat, incline, decline, lie scattered on the rubber matted floor. All of the equipment looks sharp and opaque. You're easily the blurriest presence in the room. The blue rubber floor mats are just noticeable through your arms. The hotel undoubtedly has super-perceivers who sweep through and lavish their attention on everything when things start to fade, go blurry and translucent. No one wants anything to fade out of existence, much less while they're hosting a conference of researchers trying to understand or mitigate the fading.

For a hotel, this is actually a pretty decent weight room. When you realize you can have an OK work out here, you relax. Your heart stops pounding out of your chest. Your breathing slows. That feeling that your stomach is falling into an infinite abyss goes away. You're not going to make any gains here, but you probably won't shrivel. Probably.

Except one of the one hundred pound dumbbells is missing. One sits at the respectable end of the rack where it's supposed to, but there's an empty slot where the other is supposed to be. It's wedged behind the weight tree. You didn't see it the first five times you checked there because it barely exists. That the wall seems a little greyer and a little warped are the only signs that the dumbbell there. Another few hours and it might have disappeared forever. You heft it with one hand, then pay some attention to it. The dumbbell's handle grows rough. It starts to dig into your hand. The shadow it casts on the floor shrinks and darkens. As the dumbbell grows sharp and opaque, the other person who would lift at a hotel gym at five in the morning shows up.

He stares at you, his jaw slack. You don't know his name, but his lab is the floor above yours. You've never worked up the nerve to introduce yourself to him, and you've both travelled hundreds of miles to bump into each other at a hotel gym.

He's tall and lanky. You come up to his chest. Broad shoulders and a wide back make him present like a beautiful giant. He doesn't need thick, bulging muscles to hit you like a ton of bricks, but you see hints of them beneath his shirt. Or at least muscles thick and bulging compared to yours. Maybe it's just the lighting. Perfect lighting follows him wherever he goes. It points up the planes of his face and structure of his body. Rationally, you know that he's not constantly bathed in lighting that always hits him just so. He's just absurdly good looking. Still, in a world where whatever doesn't receive enough attention disappears, you want to stick him in a dark room to see whether he glows or just blends into the dark.

"I know you." He stabs his finger at you. "You're Caleb Chan, the muscle-bound guy with the tight t-shirts. You run the digital archive lab."

You make some sort of non-committal noise. Tight t-shirts make people pay attention to you. It keeps you opaque, or at least it did. The fading is happening faster and faster.

"How is it that a super-perceiver... No, not just a super-perceiver, a high-capacity super-perceiver lets himself become blurred and translucent?" His gaze is stern. "You of all people should understand casual self-attention."

Your heart sinks. This is not the first meeting you'd once let yourself imagine.
 

"I'm not high capacity." The words are muttered. He's wearing boots, not sneakers. They can stomp someone into a bloody pancake.

You get the other hundred pound dumbbell and walk them both to a flat bench. It doesn't hit you until after you set them down that you've proven him right about high-capacity.

He rolls his eyes. "Rescuing that dumbbell from oblivion didn't even wind you. Besides, look at those arms." He points to you as he closes. "Look at that chest."

The rest of the Sondheim reference tumbles out of you. "Not to mention--"

"You're like the opposite of a Miles Gloriosus," he says, acknowledging Sondheim's reference to Plautus. "You haven't kept yourself opaque despite being high-capacity." His gaze narrows and he nods as though he, The Great Detective, has cracked the mystery. "You can't keep yourself opaque. Muscle dysmorphia?"

You nod and brace for the wise-crack. A body image disorder where you can't see yourself as anything but small and weak never engenders any sympathy. It forces you to strive for bulging muscle and, if you're at all successful, you don't look like you have a problem. Of course, it also forces you to work out injured and shut people out because they get in the way of your diet. 

What you know is what your therapist has told you and that your lab mates call you "The Great Wall of China." The latter is either vaguely complimentary or vaguely racist, probably both. When you look in the mirror, you see someone simultaneously too scrawny and too fat. To your eyes, everyone else in the world rocks their body shape, but not you. You can't perceive yourself as you actually are.

"Self-attention doesn't work for you." He smiles sympathetically. "I dated a guy with muscle dysmorphia once. Not a super-perceiver though. Not as buff and jacked as you. Convinced he was puny compared to me."

"Maybe he wasn't, but I am." You wince. Intellectually, you get that it's stupid to be honest to people about how you see yourself, just never in time. "I've been the boyfriend. It never goes well, does it..."

"Call me Latch." He grabs your waist. Someone akin to a granite cliff surrounds you. "Hold still. I am a super-perceiver too, just not high capacity. You're not so far gone that I can't bring you all the way back."

His hand grasps your forearm and the feeling is literally electric. The shock rushes up your arms then spreads across your body. His face grows stern. You grow opaque under his gaze.

When he lets go, his legs buckle. You reach out to catch him but he saves himself. His legs bent, he flops over, breaking at the waist. One hand braces him at his knee. He raises the other hand, gesturing with his palm as if to say, "I'm OK."

His chest pumps. It doesn't seem like air has had enough time to get into his lungs before it rushes back out again.

You mutter your awkward thanks, then start the warm up set of push ups you do before you bench press. Nothing you can do for Latch. He'll catch his breath eventually.

Eight reps into your first set of bench presses, Latch looms over you. It's a friendly loom but there's still an avalanche-like quality to it. He waits for you to squeeze out another seven reps, for the dumbbells to hit the mat, before he speaks.

"You're a high-capacity super-perceiver who isn't already burning up that capacity rescuing things in the private sector, so I have to ask..." He rubs his hands together. "Practice is running ahead of theory with the fading, of course. We think we have a way to perceive at a distance and over an area. We're going to need something like that soon unless we want farmland to disappear. However, we're gonna someone with a lot of capacity to spare to test our current prototype out."

This shard of virtual sunlight hovers over you, still lying on the bench. Warm browns outshine the lights on the ceiling but still strangle you in their shadow. Words abandoned you when he started looming. Thoughts of being small and weak compared to this god who stands before you crowd everything else out of your mind. At first, all you can do is look at him quizzically before a glint of realization pierces you.

"Oh, you want me as a test subject." Words go away again and you babble for a few seconds before you make another stab at coherence. "I'm sorry. Can't think right now. I need to lift."

"OK. If you change your mind, you know where to find me." His disappointment almost makes him mortal. Almost. "See you later."

"Not gonna work out?"

"I was but not any more. I'm beat." He yawns. "After making you opaque, I'm going to be useless for a few hours."

With that, he turns to leave. His stride is languid. When he's gone, you realize that you probably carry more muscle than him. It didn't feel like that when he was here though.

The gym down the block from your lab, like most everywhere else in the world these days, is one step out of focus. Massed casual attention can still keep a place solid, but it can't make any place as sharp as it once was, not any more. Forty-five pound plates are black smears that rest on the long, silver smudge that is the barbell on your squat rack. The bar gives a little when you grip it and set it on the back of your neck, as though it were covered with a thin layer of foam. A buzzing sensation crawls through your elbow to your fingers as your arm slowly goes numb. You must have strained something a workout or two ago, but you're not sure what. A sensible person would stop. You can't. You keep going. Squats don't actually work your arms, you rationalize to yourself. Besides, after a week at a conference, without a real workout soon, you'll be useless.

Exercise after exercise, rep after rep, blood swells your muscles. Your shirt stretches across your chest and back more than it does outside of the gym. Your arms bulge harder against your sleeves. The gym is this fantasyland where you look in the mirror and you can almost puzzle out how others see you. A couple of hours in the gym clears out the thoughts of being small and weak for long enough. It makes room for other things, like your day job: how to archive the world into dense and easy to perceive media so that everything can be restored again once scientists understand the fading. You'd lift every day, except you've learned the hard way you'd destroy your body if you did. When you're seriously injured, you can't lift. The ensuing anxiety and fear that you'll lose what little hard earned muscle you have makes you useless until you heal.

Your lab, unlike the gym, is crisp and opaque. Racks of motherboards and disk arrays fill the room. Rust dots their tall square storage cases, which line the walls, leaving room for a lab bench and some chairs. A black box sits on either end of the bench, connected to a computer in the middle. Dried protein shake stains cover the keyboard. Sticky bits of clear juice are scattered across the display from all the times you've peeled grapefruit at the computer.

Your legs still ache a little from all those squats. Your shirt hugs your body. Those things keep your mind clear for the mathematical transformations that render an object as data then reify them back into an object again. Your fingers glide over the keyboard. You translate the latest versions of those transformations into code on the screen. In theory, you've licked this problem. Things no one has the attention to spare for can be stored on disk. Once the scientists and engineers trying to understand the fading do so, you can retrieve those things again. In practice, you haven't. Not yet anyway. You're just trying to stomp out the bugs you found during the previous trial.

It takes an hour of build-fail-retry for the new code to compile cleanly. With a deep breath, you start the next trial.

Your stock of tiny iron cubes sits in a lab bench drawer. You take one and lavish some attention on it, letting it grow colder and harder in your hand. Its molecular structure needs to be as easy to detect as possible.

The iron cube goes into the scanner, the black box to your left. A soft, low-pitched thrum fills the room. The scanning process destroys the object. For now, you're capturing the energy that scanning releases to power the reconstructor, the black box on your right. If governments, museums, or even private citizens ever scan things to archive, you have no idea where they will find the energy to reconstruct those things. Maybe they can store the energy released during scanning in some ultra-dense battery that, like the archive, will also need to be kept solid. That's not your problem yet.

The lingering effects of your workout haven't dissipated yet. Your mind can still focus. Your body will always be inadequate but it should be hours before your constant internal reminders can debilitate you. It'll be a while before the trial has produced any result you can check. This is the right time to engage the broad, black-haired, bronze god upstairs. If you can't hold yourself together around him right now, you may never be able to.

The door to Latch's lab is open when you get there. His surprised expression when he notices you matches your own. He's still tall and he's still broad. Perfect lighting still seems to set him up just so. However, he's no longer an avalanche, a ton of bricks or a god masquerading as a shard of sunlight. His arms seem a little thin for a hulking man his height. Even your arms may be nearly as big as his. This may be as close as you'll ever come to getting your relative sizes right. You still think he dwarfs you, however, and you're still wrong.

"Caleb." One word with a bright smile and you want to run back downstairs. "Change your mind?"

"Yeah." You stuff your hands into your pockets. "I was too distracted to decide when we spoke at the conference."

"Great." He comes to the door and shakes your hand. "The lab isn't ready for the trial yet, but why don't we have lunch together tomorrow? Just to make sure you're fully informed first."

"Sure." You draw the word out as your mind races. The endless rearranging of meals like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and the attempt to make lunch with him a piece that fits crowd everything else out of your head. The need to hit your required levels of macronutrients every day once meant you never ate with anyone. The fear that if you didn't get just the right amount of protein every two hours, you'd shrink down to nothing made you refuse anyone who asked. Now, your heart just pounds way too fast and hard.

"You usually bring lunch, right?" He doesn't wait for a response. He's seen you eat. "Why don't I just meet you in the cafeteria tomorrow at noon?"

"OK, thanks." Your heartbeat slows. Your fists unclench, which is when you realize you'd squeezed your hands into fists in the first place. "See you tomorrow."

You retreat back into your own lab. The status of your trial fills your computer's display. It's done with no errors flagged. Hope does not well up in your heart. The reconstruction phase has failed too many times.

You open the black box on the right. Instead of a reconstructed small cube of iron, what sits inside is slush, not metallic, and the consistency of oatmeal. You collect it into a vial for analysis so that you can guess at what went wrong. Another day, another pile of bugs.

Two lab benches sitting on their side, one lashed on top of the other, form a wall that splits Latch's lab in half. In preparation for this trial, he's left the other side unattended for weeks. Whatever is on the other side is undoubtedly translucent and indistinct by now.

Latch is futzing with a short server rack he's wheeled next to the wall. Tendrils of black cable stretch away from it in two directions. Some are entwined around the legs of the lab benches. Others end at a harness next to him.

After several weeks of lunches and conversations about musicals, football, and Nabokov, among other things, you're starting to crack the code of how Latch presents. He's an avid rock-climber and his body has molded itself to the sport. A broad back with thick thighs and calves that poke out from his jeans make him present bigger and taller than he actually is. Climbing isn't about the biceps, triceps or the pecs though. You keep reminding yourself that you both wear the same size shirts but his leave plenty of room for his chest and are loose around his arms. You keep reminding yourself that he's not as overwhelmingly buff and powerful as you can't help thinking.

Latch turns towards you. He assesses the way you're staring at him. "You didn't lift today."

"No." You shift your gaze away. "It's a rest day."

"I can't get you to take off your shirt?" He approaches you with the harness. "It'll make better contact if you do."

"No, shirt stays on." You wave your hands in front of you. "Gotta create the illusion of size somehow. Otherwise, you'll realize how puny I actually am."

He rolls his eyes at you as he wraps the harness around your head. Sensors stick to your temples. Ribs of elastic cable stretch across the back of your head. He unfolds the harness down your torso. It stretches tight against your shirt and binds your forearms. 

"Ready?" His gaze sweeps up and down your body. He prods and stretches the harness.

You take a deep breath. No one knows exactly what will happen when Latch turns on the machine in his server rack.

"Just do it."

Latch backs away from you. He reaches inside the short server rack then flips a few switches. They click and the sound bounces around the room.

Almost immediately, a sharp pain cracks your head. It stabs like twin awls through your eyes. What had been ribs of elastic cable are now cold, hard curves of rusty dulled steel. They bite into you and tear at your flesh, but there are no wounds and there is no blood. Ghosts of scattered computer gear and office furniture on the other side of the wall clutter your mind. It hijacks your gaze. You can see benches and chairs slowly resolve into focus when your legs buckle and you lose consciousness.

When you wake, you are lying on the floor. The harness sits in a shredded heap next to you. Latch, crouched by your side, looms. His shoulders never seemed so broad. His thighs balloon against his jeans. You feel weak. Your shirt feels loose. It droops off your arms and pools around your torso. Latch, however, looks ready, not merely to climb a mountain, but toss it on his broad back and march it around the world. It's as though what muscle you've gained over the decades have been stolen from you and packed onto his mighty and beautiful body.

You scuttle away from Latch. He reaches for you but you're somehow fast enough to evade his grasp. You struggle to get your feet under you.

"Caleb, don't panic." He's barely touched you, but you rocket to a stand. His strength must be super-human. "You're just tapped out and, knowing you, massively misperceiving our relative sizes. That's all. You'll be yourself in a couple of hours."

He wraps his arms around you. They feel like a vice around your chest but they look relaxed and thin, not the massive tree trunks they must be when he flexes them.

"Seriously? I can see you just fine." You break away too easily. Maybe he let go. "I can't be here with you."

"I don't think you should be alone right now." He takes a step towards you. The perfect light that follows him highlights every muscle on his body.

"I'm fine. It's not always about muscle dysmorphia." You back your way out the door. "I just need to be alone for a while."

The shame of being so small and weak can be hard to deal with. Right now, you don't want to be seen by anyone. You scramble out the door.

"Call me. Anytime you want. If you need anything. Please, just call." Latch's words are echoes from down the hall.

You huddle in a seat at the end of a subway car. Everyone seems to have their moment staring at you with a sneer before looking away with revulsion. It's a relief when you barricade yourself in your apartment.

Despair pins you in bed. Not even the automatic urge to lift can get you out of bed, much less the apartment. It's a couple of days before you remember again that shirts stretch and relax. Even the ones that feel unconscionably tight in the morning develop a little play in the sleeves by the afternoon.

This is hardly your first meltdown. They always take a couple of days before the fear of shriveling even further overtakes the despair of being weak and small. However, the fading is getting quicker and quicker. This time, when you turn on the bedroom light for the first time in three days, the room is blurry, but you're barely here. You cast no shadow and your gaze solidifies your chest of drawers through your forearms.

Your indistinct blob of a phone slips through your hands at first. However, it becomes substantial under your gaze and you call the only person you can think of.

"Um... Latch?" Words dribble out of you. After your meltdown in front of him, you're not sure he will ever want to talk to you again. "I need... can you..."

"I'll be right over."

"No, um--" Latch hangs up before you can get anything else out.

Your apartment is a blurry mess. The idea Latch will see this sends you into a tidying frenzy. You take off the shirt you've worn for days and put on a clean shirt you make opaque and crisp. Unaccountably, it strangles you even though it's been whole days since you've even seen a weight or eaten. Despite everything that's happened, the shirt squeezes your shoulders and stretches across your chest, back and arms. 

By the time the doorbell rings, your clothes have all been stowed in a laundry hamper or a closet. Dishes have been washed. Bottles of protein powder have been hidden in the pantry. Your living room has never been so tidy. Books sit in the bookshelves not on the floor. Sofa cushions rest exactly in their proper places. For the first time in months, you can see the surface of the coffee table. Your apartment looks as sharp and as opaque as it did before the fading became a thing.

You open the door. Latch's eyes widen. His words catch in his throat, leaving his jaw hanging. Like you, he's too dark to actually pale but, as blood drains from his face, his attempt is heroic.

He grabs your forearms. His stare sweeps up and down your body. Your jeans grow distinct, but you don't.

"Can't do it." Latch is out of breath. "You're so far gone. Need to see more of you to have a chance."

You shake your head as you back up. He follows you into your apartment then closes the door behind him.

"Oh." You sit on the sofa, and run your hands over your scalp. It's past time to shave. Might as well go to oblivion clean shaven. "I'm sorry I called you over for nothing."

"Caleb." If only the incredulity in Latch's voice could bring you back. "Even if your body were something to be ashamed of--which it's not--plenty of guys see you without a shirt on in the locker room, right?"

"Sure, but I don't care about them." You shrug. "You, on the other hand... Maybe there's nothing to me besides the illusion generated by a tight T-shirt. If I take my shirt off, you'll see what a fraud I am."

"OhGodOhGodOhGod." Again and again, he taps the palm of one hand with the back of the other. His eyes shut and he swallows hard before he opens them again. "This is so not the time for a conversation about our relationship."

"Relationship?" You furrow your brow. "We don't have a relationship."

"Not if you don't take off your shirt, we don't, because you'll be dead." He leans into you. "I'm not even going to try to convince you that how you look in a T-shirt isn't an illusion, Caleb, but I'd really like the relationship conversation with you. Please, Caleb, just do this for me. How you look is the least interesting thing about you."

You peer up at him. He stands over you, but he's not overwhelming. Latch does not have a chest that needs its own time zone and, much as he loves watching football, he doesn't play. As you settle into the calm of your impending death, you get that his skeleton is large enough that he can't pack on enough muscle mass to be a bulging powerhouse. That's just what you keep creating in your mind from a set broad shoulders, a trim waist, and oddly perfect lighting.

His face looks concerned. The calculation of whether he can force the T-shirt off you grinds behind his eyes. Whatever the answer, though, he simply waits for you to do something. He's talked you into his experiment and, even if it went disastrously, he's still the first person you called. You'd like that conversation with him. That means, though, your T-shirt has to come off. You have to show him what you actually look like, and it's not the illusion a tight t-shirt implies. 

The T-shirt fights back at first. Crossing your arms to grab the hem flares your lats. The shirt you'd expected to be loose was already snug to begin with. This just makes it dig into you as you pull it over your head. You're sure you look ridiculous as you stand then wriggle and twist for the minute it takes to get the shirt off, but Latch doesn't laugh.

The shirt is still in your hand when his gaze lacerates you. His arms nestle your waist. The two of you stand motionless, staring at each other, for what seems like days. When you are opaque again, when the shadow you cast on the floor is as sharp and defined as the coffee table, he shakes his head and blinks a few times.

"Nothing wrong with that." He makes an appraising gaze of your torso, his arms now folded across his chest. "I wouldn't mind seeing that again."

"Thank you. I--"

"Catch me--"

Latch collapses and you catch him before he hits the coffee table. You shift your grip so that he lies across your arms then, gingerly, you lower him onto the sofa. He takes up most of its length. He's lighter than you expected. Then again, you're always surprised when the strength you seem to show in the fantasyland that is the gym crosses over into real life.

You sit on the coffee table, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. Even now, the lighting in the room seems to have shifted to accommodate his new position.

Even though you both know better, he asks you out to the theater and you accept. It's a production of The Human Comedy, after all. It's pretty much never produced and you've wanted to see this on stage since you were a kid. This is a production that fulfills the promise you heard in the show's cast album. The audience laughs and applauds at all the right places. Their massed attention keeps the sets and actors solid and opaque. Before, during, and after the show, you are both perfect gentlemen with each other. Even in bed.

Your experiments are going better, you suppose. At least iron cubes now reconstruct as something metallic, if not cubic. The result still kind of looks like breakfast. Latch's work shows more promise which is why, you tell yourself, you find yourself back in Latch's lab, caged again in the contraption that, weeks ago, convinced you that you had the body of a spindly teenager too weak to bench even an empty bar.

Latch flicks the switch and you brace. Outlines of ghostly lab benches and computers from the other side of the wall overlay the solid lab benches and computers here.

"How do you feel?" The expression on his face smacks of fear.

"A little weak. A little small." You hold up a hand to stop him when he reaches to unstrap you from the harness. "But I've been more intimidated by you before."

It's not a good idea for you two to date each other. Eventually, he'll become too annoyed at how you constantly misperceive yourself to deal with you. Maybe, one day, his mere existence will cow you so much that the despair will finally get to you. However, he's sweet and smart and you two have far too much in common.

Besides, the rate of the fading is increasing every day. Unless someone figures out what's going on, one day, super-perceivers won't be enough to keep the world in existence. You don't want to be alone when the world fades away, and you don't think he does either.

"Latch." You can't look at him. "There's a production of The Golden Apple coming up."

Again, another lost gem you thought you'd never see in your lifetime. Something about the end of the world makes artistic directors program shows that only diehards can love.

"Really? Where? I saw a concert version once."

"The Berkshires."

"Well, we gotta plan a weekend trip or something."

You were planning to see it anyway. It might as well be with the one other person who will appreciate it.

Slowly, what's on the other side of the wall gains heft and solidity. The visual contradiction of what's there overlapping with what's here becomes a bit much for you and you squeeze your eyes shut. Computers and benches from the other side, though, remain in your gaze. Whatever Latch's contraption is doing, it doesn't just spread your attention over an area, but one physically isolated from you. There seems to be a lot of attenuation even over the few feet to the wall, though, given how slowly things are returning. It's still a step towards making sure farmland doesn't disappear overnight.

Minutes pass and your legs start to shake. A chill passes through your body. You're not infinite capacity. No one is, but you're higher than many, if not most. You're nowhere near tapped out and you know that, but you know what you're like when you are. What courses through you is more fear than exhaustion.

"Say the word, Caleb, and I'll pull the plug on the trial."

It's hard to shake your head in the harness but you do anyway. "No, keep going. I'm fine."

"Thank you, Caleb."

A large hand with slim fingers works its way into your grasp. Its warmth seems to spread up your arm and through the rest of your body. The fear racing through you ebbs. Your mind clears a little and, in this age where attention has become important, you can see your way to using more of your capacity.

The hand grips yours firmly, but not too firmly. You can let go anytime you want, but you don’t.

************************************************

"Nothing to eat," he says, sadly. "I didn't want protein powder. Almost as bad as sucrose."

"The fading is really scary," Maya says. "It felt so real." She looks around as if to make sure everything in the library is still solid and sharp edged. The cat's fur rippled full of iridescent rainbows in the sunlight, but everything else seems the same, the great vaulted arches with the stacks behind, the librarian's table, the sun and clouds, rooftops and dome visible through the high windows. "It's a story about friendship, really," she adds.

"About love," he says. "Both of these last two have been about finding love, the women in the museum, the guys working out and researching in this one. Nice to see."

"Mmm."

"What, do you want a story about enemies?" he asks.

"Do we have one?"

"Sure." He looks at her. "It's even set on an alien planet."

"All right!" Maya reaches for it.

"It's Yves Meynard's Her Venom. Yves writes in English and French, and he claims he gets ideas in one language or the other. He's probably best known in English for his novel Chrysanthe, which is a bit like if the Amber books were written by Gene Wolfe."

"That sounds fascinating and also really weird," Maya says. 

She takes the book, and they read.