The Glass Box

George first noticed V a few days prior, while on his way to visit his mother, Joan, whom he’d recently moved into a retirement community just outside of the city. The commute, roughly three hours to-and-back, put some distance between George and the only family he had left, a distance he said would be good for the both of them, a distance whose gravity he’d failed to calibrate properly, possessing a force with the ability to contort the both of them into new shapes, pinched and twisted at unnatural angles. On account of the long drive, George made it a habit of getting on the road early, lest he get gridlocked with the other Saturday morning drivers, fellow sons and daughters evading emotional delinquency.

It was while walking to his car, parked by the curb outside of his apartment complex, Rebus Estates, that the figure appeared, a shadow George thought he saw crawl behind his car, prowling low like a starved wildcat. He checked all about the street, up and down the sidewalk, but found nothing. Maybe someone’s shadow got free. His imagination was resurrecting in his solitude. Satisfied, George got into his car and drove, radio off and windows rolled down, a quiet ritual of de-stressing that he gifted himself on his weekly visits. But he saw them, again and again. The shadows. V.

And again, throughout the rest of the day, while driving up the freeway, while walking to his mother’s room, while sitting and talking with her about the goings-on of the other “old timers,” about his interview with Cuada Equina Global, a multinational corporation who manufactured everything from headache pills to high-powered semi-automatic firearms, he saw V. Dark, swift, always at the edges of his field of vision, George couldn’t quite get a good look—at first. But he could sense V right around every corner, almost see them through every wall, over his own reflection, in the splits and gaps of space in between our own. Was he imagining things? Losing his mind? The very posing of the question convinced George otherwise. At least that’s what he told himself.

As days passed, the outline and contours of V’s body came into focus. George no longer questioned their realness, nor his own sanity. He got his first clear look at V’s “face” in the middle of the night. George awoke to find the figure hovering in a corner of his room, a pale white face making a threat of itself from the shadows, features distorted, molded as if from a doll’s vinyl. George couldn’t move, paralyzed in the half-sleep of mid-consciousness, floating weightless in that threshold of space between this world and the other, that realm of primal beings and deep memory. Chills broke along his skin.

Then, V spoke. George could hardly make out the words, much less form a response. Unfazed, V hovered silently, watching George from deep within eyes that sucked like black holes.

George slipped back into sleep…

V followed George to his interview that morning with Cuada Equina, all the way to the top floor of Nyquenas Tower, a monolithic superstructure from which the rest of the city spilled, so it all looked like it was melting. Part office space, part shopping center, part condo complex, its 157 stories bled with people from all walks of life, people who went about their business quietly and separated, like punished schoolchildren. They navigated Nyquenas via a network glass elevators, transparent boxes that went for thousands of feet along aluminum, copper, steel. George usually made it a point to avoid Nyquenas whenever possible. The building, its colossal frame, the subtle curvature noticed only when viewed up close, all the shadow it cast, never made George feel at ease. And now he had V, whatever they were, following.

George first noticed V that day while entering the lobby, phasing in and out of the crowd at impossible speeds, circulating George’s orbit at all times, taunting him with ubiquity. Ascending, he felt V over his shoulder, heavy and still, but he never turned around. Instead, George looked down at the people below, cells of life operating both within and without the natural world, godless and unknowing.

A bell ding, indicating his arrival to the top floor of Nyquenas Tower. As George stepped off of the elevator, V somehow slipped away, as had seemingly everyone else. The top story of Nyquenas appeared devoid of all human life except George himself, as if the building had been erected along a vertical timeline whose summit was a pre-human era that he’d been invited to see, if only once.

George negotiated the offices of C.E.G., a maze of frameless glass walls and subtle doorways. It was as if he’d been lured into a trap inhabited solely by his own bent reflections. When he finally reached the front desk, occupied by no one, he was greeted by a voice that came from speakers hidden in the ceiling.

“Welcome, George. Please be seated while your party is notified. Thank you and—” Silenced. Strange, thought George. High strangeness indeed.

George took a seat in the waiting area, an aseptic space, air frigid like an emergency room in the middle of a Sunday night. One glass wall was frosted, steel handle prominent, George assumed, to conceal the office of whomever it was he was meeting. The air buzzed with vague, artificially-generated sounds of “nature.” George wondered if he was alone, here in this room, in this building, this city, world—

“Your party is ready.” The click of the office door unlocking. George, eager to move past his delusions—as he saw them—leapt forward and stepped through the door.

Mr. Post, a lean, middle-aged executive whose fingernails shaded the same shade of brown-yellow as the cigarette butts of which they reeked, sat behind a desk the same deep-black hue as crude oil. His walls were frameless glass tinted digitally, the rest of the city sprawling endlessly in all directions, barely visible. George shivered.

“Please, take a seat.”

George hesitated. “Of course.” It was all he could manage as he sat opposite Post, hands shaking, grimy with sweat. This isn’t me. George tried not to dwell on that or any other number of odd things he’d seen on his way up to 157. Conscious shadows, empty floors, black windows obscuring pavements naked of people—

A snap of Post’s fingers. “Young man.”

George returned to his body. “Uh, I’m sorry, you were—”

“I was inquiring about previous employment.”

“Oh, that. Odd jobs, mostly.”

“Any assignment that you found particularly gratifying?”

“Gratifying?”

“Yes.”

“In what sense?”

Post smiled wet teeth outlined in black soot; George though of his mother’s neighbors. Of his mother.

“Will you excuse me?” With that, Post was out the door. If his goal was to rattle George, he’d succeeded. Those brief moments of solitude, accumulating and compacting, were lethal for George’s immediate sense of self and being. Where the fuck am I? He began to grow dizzy by altitude, could feel the pull of gravity and the invisible weight of every foot compressing between him and the earth.

George checked his watch; somehow, four hours had passed in four minutes. He needed to move, anywhere, in any way.

Moments later, George found himself stumbling through the Cuada Equina offices, in a series of jump cuts, in search of Post, or another employee, or any sign of life. Nothing. Not even V, the shadow who, strangely enough, George now sought for strange refuge, his mystic companion of seemingly ambivalent desire. Not a soul but George and the voice who hid in the ceiling, watching from above.

The elevators. Confounding as the layout of this floor might be, so long as George kept walking, he knew he was bound to find one of those glass boxes. Indeed, after a series of windowless rooms, through dark spaces with sharp edges, across hallways that led inward, like collapsing fractal interiors, by a light of unknown origin, at the end of a long hallway: an elevator.

Now, trapped in a glass box, George descended Nyquenas Tower, which stood completely empty, all 157 stories, level upon level of cement-bound steel frame, its shadowy corners erected at perfect 90° degree angles. A total absence of life permeated all around him like the belligerent atmosphere of an alien planet, aggressive and void. All the way down, suffocating inside of his mechanized cloche, floor after floor of desolation passing before him, blurring hints of light, the Tower stood a dead column, vacant and angular.

George caught a glimpse of himself in the elevator glass, distorted by vertigo, wool suit wrinkled, hair tousled, eyes hollowed and weary, as he sunk, subsumed by an uncanny version of his old world, dead and gray. He thought of his mother, poor Joan, who’d only tried her best but seemed always to come up short of some arbitrary metric devised by her ungrateful son and, for her troubles, was banished, out of sight and out of mind—for his comfort and her despair—he thought of poor Joan and fell to his knees.

Where was she? Had his mother, like the rest of the world, vanished? Was she still out there somewhere? Or was it George who had disappeared, been displaced, taken from under the black waters of his night sky and discarded beneath another, a perfect recreation of his old reality, every object immaculately reproduced according to an old world counterpart, even ones he’d never even seen before? Was everybody else still going about their respective business, walking side-by-side, veiled under cover of another plane, looking down on George and wondering why this madman was breaking down in public? Either way, he was alone.

Through the floor of the glass box, George watched the void below as it consumed him. In his heart of hearts, he knew this dead world was no illusion, nor temporary dream-state, nor madness, but instead, his new, permanent reality, a barren stage mocking in its dearth of players. George saw nothing but still forms on a planet that couldn’t breathe in its sleep.

As George reached the ground floor of Nyquenas Tower, he saw a dark figure come forward: V, the shadow, waiting for him to exit the glass box.