40
If the world still remembers me after the games, they’ll remember me for keeping ten million viewers awake, glued to the TV, waiting for me without any games being played. Sitting there rotting for hours with their junk food, their fizzy drinks, and recharging their iAms impatiently, like watching a silent movie where no one speaks or acts. You can’t leave before knowing what happens to the hero in the end. Will she die? Will she live?
I am sitting in front of my cave, helpless, looking at an unconscious Leo, still hanging onto the frayed rope of life, although I have every reason not to.
Every hour, I will report that I am alive. That’s like having to call your mom or dad every hour while you’re out with your friends, just so they can make sure you’re all right. “Hello, Daddy. I am all right. I am not doing drugs, not flirting with boys, and no one has kidnapped me yet. I just have a little problem. I am in the Monster Show, and if I don’t make it back for lunch, please tell Mom not to be angry with me, because I will be dead.”
I blow out a laugh at this one. It echoes between the two mountains, playing ping-pong with my voice.
Every hour, I have to say I am alive.
The first hour is like waiting for your best friend to pick you up in her car so you can go to the school dance together. An hour passes and your friend doesn’t show up because she has met that handsome boy in class she always wanted to talk to, and totally forgot about you. You tell yourself it’s okay. An hour late isn’t that late. You can go to the dance by yourself. Not that it’s the best of choices on a day like that, but why not?
But I have nowhere to go now. No dance, no school, and no nothing. It turns out that having nothing was an asset before. I am trapped in this semi-cave in the middle of a huge mountain, unable to go anywhere. This is my new home away from home. Even if I risk climbing up and succeed in killing Carnivore, I still have nowhere to go: no friends, no home, and no family. What’s a winner without friends or family?
And in regards to Woo, I have to face the truth. Woo is dead. He was killed by Carnivore. He didn’t have time to escape and pretend that he was dead. And if he did, there is no way he survived this battlefield. And there’s no Rabbit Hole. There is no Wonderland. Sorry, Alice.
I push the red button on my iAm and spread the word. “I am alive.” I say it without feeling, like that song I had to sing in the school’s assembly, knowing everyone would laugh at me because I can’t sing, but the school insists you participate.
The audience is silent. Timmy is silent. They just write it on the screen that the latest contestant is still alive.
What about Leo? He is still alive, but can’t confirm it. I shake him. He grunts and moans as I clamp my iAm to his mouth.
“Say I am alive, Leo,” I whisper softly, on the verge of pleading. “Please.”
“I am alive,” he mumbles with closed eyes. “God.”
The audience laughs at Leo. Or maybe at God.
I have made it through the first hour.
The second hour is like the first. You’re lost, but hope isn’t. It’s like when you’re standing all alone on that lonely street, after your friend bailed on you, thinking how to get to the dance in that dress you’re wearing. Should you walk to the dance, and not care what happens to your dress on the way? A car splashing water from the street onto it maybe? People hissing behind your back about why you’re walking the streets alone in a soirée dress, with no Prince Charming accompanying you?
You could call a taxi, but you don’t want a lousy driver to spoil your mood today, talking, asking questions, nah, you’d better keep on walking. Let the clockwork of your heart walk you to your destination. Your heart is like time, unstoppable, whatever happens. So are you. You are going to the dance on foot. Let them hiss behind your back. You don’t care.
Here I am with the world watching me, praising me when I entertain them. Booing at me and crossing the threshold of my privacy when I don’t, when I am only trying to be me.
I sit cross-legged like a Buddha and hit the red button.
“I am alive,” I say, as if asking for one more cube of sugar in my coffee. Within the next hour it will be sunset, so it won’t be just Leo and I hung between Heaven and Hell. The sun will join us briefly, before it sinks into its bed to sleep.
“Leo.” I shake him again. “God wants to know if you’re still alive.” I can’t think of anything better to grab his attention.
“He knows,” says Leo with closed eyes, hiding that stubborn fighter behind them, “that I am alive.”
The last three words are all that matters. Timmy nods that he has gotten the message. He thinks it’s only a couple of hours before I give up. I fetch my backpack, looking for something that could help Leo. I find a bottle of water, and force him to drink.
The third hour is when you think you’ve made it. Yes. After you’ve walked alone for some time, not caring about what the older people say about that young girl walking alone in the street, avoiding whatever could harm your dress on the way, you feel braver and more confident. It doesn’t matter that you’re walking alone. You’ll get to the dance, and maybe you’ll find Prince Charming – or actually just dance.
But the sun, your only friend now, sinks, and you walk with the burden of the weight of the darkness on your bare shoulders.
***
I crouch slowly next to Leo under the cave, and wrap his heavy arm around me.
“I know. I know,” he moans. “I am alive.”
“You better stay that way,” I say, and hit him lightly on the chest, making sure I can feel the warmth of his body against the chill of the night. His body isn’t warm enough. He is getting colder, losing blood. The t-shirt I tied around his leg isn’t effective. I think of the fire we sat around in the forest, and try to feel it on my body. With it comes the image of my friends, Pepper, Vern, Bellona, and Woodsy. They’re all dead now. Did Carnivore kill them all, like it killed Woo?
A tear falls onto Leo’s blood-stained chest. Somehow, it causes him to wriggle, then faint again.
The fourth hour is like when you try to get used to the dark, when your pupils widen like a cat’s, and the dark becomes familiar. Not so bad after all. We dream in the dark, don’t we?
All you have to do is to remind yourself of where you’re going, and just keep on going. There will be dark alleys that you can’t see through. There will be red eyes looking back from the dark. There will be strangers you have never met, and they might want to harm you. There will be familiar faces that change into something else, more sinister, in the dark. There’ll be monsters — I chuckle lightly at the thought.
Monsters. What are they? Are they good or bad? Am I a monster, or is it that the iAms are one big, one-eyed monster, like Carnivore?
I remember a song Woo used to love called People Are Strange by the Doors, a band from the days of the Amerikaz. I feel the same way the singer felt in that song.
Yes. There’ll be monsters. Only real monsters. Is it a necessity that to fight the monsters, you’ll have to be a monster?
You tell yourself no as you keep walking, breathing deeper, letting the air in your lungs drive you where you want to go. The school dance. Keep going.
“Are you there, Decca?” Timmy’s voice in my ears.
“Yeah—” I snap, discovering I have napped on Leo’s chest. “Is it time?”
“I could have just let you sleep away, and I would’ve considered you dead,” Timmy notes. I wonder why he hasn’t. It’s not like him to do such a thing. What was I thinking, falling asleep? “The audience reminded me. Some of the audience actually wants to know how you can pull it off.”
“I am alive,” I say. “I am alive.” I shake Leo to wake up and say it again. Leo doesn’t move.
“It’s God, Leo,” Timmy laughs. “Timmy, the God.”
The audience laughs, but not all of them.
“Leo.” I shake him harder, and try to give him water. Leo isn’t answering. “Don’t you die on me,” I yell at him. “Don’t you die, Leo.”
The audience starts to feel worried like me.
I slap Leo on the face. “Wake up!” I slap him again. “You can’t do this to me.” The cave is too narrow for me to hit him harder. I slide myself from under his arm, and try to push him out to the small landing. I don’t know how to apply first-aid, so this is all I can think of, to push him where I can sit on his chest and hit him as hard as I can to wake him up. Isn’t that what they do on TV?
Leo is heavy. I try to push him with my feet. Finally, he moves a little, but not enough. I take a deep breath and push harder. He finally glides from inside the cave to the ledge.
The audience shrieks. How can they even see me?
Leo is on the edge of falling. What have I done?
I crawl out of the cave and start to pull him back. One of his arms is dangling over the edge into the void.
As I pull, I notice there are a couple of iSees floating in the air, televising me. So they’ve found a way to watch us again. Hungry TV watchers. They never get enough.
I pull Leo back. My arm feels out of place. It starts bleeding like Leo. The cut has torn deeper.
“It’s getting a bit too late for him to say it,” Timmy interferes. I totally neglect his existence, sitting on top of Leo’s chest, pounding on him. I try to breathe into his mouth.
Nothing.
Girls from the audience begin to send me first-aid tutorials about how to save him on my iAm. As if I can’t search for it myself. It’s not about what to do. It’s about how to do it.
I rest my ear against his chest. He is still breathing. That’s good. So what’s wrong with him?
Hysterically, I search the backpack again. My last hope. As I rummage through it, I find one of Leo’s strange syringes, like the one I used to wake him with the electric shock after defusing the bomb in his mouth.
Blindly and irrationally, I pull a syringe and stab his neck with it. Leo shudders in place, then goes to sleep again. I wait a little, knowing it has a delayed effect. He breathes again, as if longing for all the air in the world after drowning.
The audience lets out sighs of relief. Timmy must be gritting his teeth.
“What’s wrong with you?” Leo furrows his brows, staring at me, looking fresher. That syringe is magical. Will its effect last against his pain?
The crowd laughs at Leo’s reaction. He looks around like he has never seen this place before.
“What do you mean what’s wrong with me?” I bounce back at his foolishness, camouflaging that I am so freaking happy to see him come back. “I just saved your sorry ass!”
“How can you save my ass standing on top of me?” he says like he has no heart. It means he is back, and he is functioning.
He looks around, dazed. I think he is looking for his gun. I don’t know what to say to him. He’d been hallucinating all that time. The syringe kicked him back to life again. At least he doesn’t think I am God anymore.
“Where is my Super-V?” he demands, like a drunken madman.
Wow. This is so out of place. Maybe he is hallucinating again. Only in a different form. I gaze at his leg, and wish he wouldn’t look at it. It’s bleeding more than before. How much blood did he lose?
“Forget about your Super-V,” I shout back. “Just smile at the camera, and say I am alive.” I push the iAm, almost against his nose.
“You know damn well that I am alive!”
Good. That’s all I needed. I stare at Timmy, and he nods reluctantly. “Okay. Okay. That counts,” says Timmy. “Although, I wonder if he actually remembers his own name.”
“Where is the camera?” says Leo, looking into the nowhere.
“Why?”
“I want to say cheese.” He slurs the words out of his mouth, showing his big white teeth for a second.
Audience laugh. Audience tic. Audience tac. Audience toe.
That’s when Leo’s head falls back abruptly, as if someone has just pulled the plug out of him. I check his pulse and make sure he is alive. I won’t try to wake him again before the next hour.