Exit Lane
After learning that she's a digital copy, Gangle reflects on what she'd been about to do when she entered the circus. There's no way of knowing if she went through with it, but she really, really hopes that she didn't.
Trigger warning for suicidal thoughts.
-
Zooble lay in bed, where they’d been staying all-but-motionless since Caine had been deleted and they’d found out that the real them was still out there. There was no way to tell the time, but it felt like it’d been days. Why not? They didn’t have to eat or use the bathroom, and the circus was a hole-riddled husk of itself, so why not just lie in bed and imagine what the real them was doing? It had been… what? A year since they’d been uploaded? Maybe they were still a tattoo artist. Maybe they still lived with their three roommates and their dog. That was real. Everything here... in spite of what they'd told themselves... was all fake.
Zooble heard a noise- something high-pitched and muffled. At first they just rolled over and pulled their pillow around their head, but then it started to sound like… crying? Gangle’s crying. As soon as Zooble opened their bedroom door, they could hear her sobbing harder than they’d ever heard her do so before.
Oh God. What if she’s abstracting? Gangle, hold on!
Zooble ran to Gangle’s door and opened it. There were no neon eyes or glitchy shapes behind it, thank God, just a regular, ribbony Gangle sitting on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest as she sniffled and wiped tears away. Zooble’s shoulders fell as their panic faded.
“Oh, Gangle… you been like this since Kinger told us?”
Gangle shook her head, still sniffling.
“Well, I still wish I’d come sooner,” Zooble murmured as they sat down on the bed next to her. They didn’t ask what was wrong- it would’ve been pointless to. Learning that the real them was still out there in the world had hit everyone really hard. Gangle leaned on them, and her crying started to slow.
“I… thought she wouldn’t have to find me,” Gangle managed through tears.
“Find you…?” Zooble asked.
Gangle turned her head away. “My mom. I was about to do something… really bad, a-and I thought, at least if I ended up here, I didn’t do it, right?”
Zooble put a hand on her shoulder. “What did you do?”
“Well, I don’t know if I really did it. A-and I don’t really know how to tell you while I don’t know my name, but… I’ll try.” She half-turned to Zooble and offered a self-deprecating little smile. “It’s actually kind of silly, when you look at it from a distance.”
-
Zoey fought the lock to her comfortable little domestic cage. The lock finally clicked, and she entered. The smell hit her instantly- old food and mold. She plodded over to the furry, neglected dishes in the sink, kidded herself into thinking she had it in her to clean them, and then, five seconds into running the water, gave up and put them in the garbage bin before padding over to the couch and flopping down. Her fault for letting a few good days convince her she was too good for paper plates.
Even beyond the days-old dishes, the apartment was dirty. Not just messy- dirty. Old takeout containers littered the table, stains decorated the carpet, and clutter was abundant. Zoey turned on the TV- not to watch, really. Just to make her thoughts less loud.
It had been forty-one days since Zoey had narrowly avoided being hit by a semi truck, and on thirty-seven of them, she’d wished she hadn’t.
It hadn’t been a big deal, really. She’d been using a crosswalk to get to her bus stop, a driver must’ve not seen the red light, and she’d had to scramble out of its way. Yeah, it gave her a little scare. But if it had happened at a better time in her life, well, she probably wouldn’t have been thinking about it almost six weeks later.
Zoey thought that her dead-end job was just a quick detour in her life, some structure to help her get her shit together to make her next try at art school. That… hadn’t happened. Instead, she’d stayed so long she’d been promoted to shift manager- a position in which all of her underlings hated her and didn’t think she deserved. Her depression hadn’t gotten any better, even before the promotion, even after doubling her meds. She didn’t have the will to draw in the evenings anymore. When it got bad, she didn’t have it in her to shower. She’d lost contact with most of her friends to avoid answering questions about her life. And every day since her near-death experience, she’d looked out onto those six lanes of traffic. Sometimes with fear. Sometimes with longing, imagining being hit and sent to a new world, like in her favourite shows. Sometimes, just wondering if she’d have the nerve to just… run out and let happen what should’ve happened.
After some time drifting away in front of the TV, Zoey checked her phone and found a formal little text summoning her to her manager’s office at the beginning of her shift the next day. A lump formed in her throat. She didn’t know if she’d screwed up or not- she’d made a few little mistakes here and there that she’d hoped no one would notice or care about- but regardless, maybe that was it: tomorrow was the day she got fired. Or at least, a day where she’d get chewed out.
I’ve survived meetings like this before.
But I really don’t want to survive another. And another one after that, and another one after that, with however many of these pointless days in between…
Well, there's one way to avoid it…
Yeah. Yeah, that was it. She’d do it tonight, and then there’d be no meeting to worry about. The thought perked her up a little.
Anything I should put in order before I go?
She looked again at the sorry state of her apartment.
…Not this. It’d take all night. And then I might talk myself out of it. And anyway, if this is it, I might as well indulge a little.
Zoey served herself a big bowl of chocolate cake and chocolate cherry ice cream (can’t get fatter if you’re dead, after all) and ate it as she transcribed the suicide note she’d written on her notes app over a few bus trips. The printer paper wasn’t perfect for drawing, but she was feeling peppy enough to sketch a couple flowers on the edges- the plan had given her a little burst of energy, and she was going to take it for all it was worth. A couple flowers turned into nineteen minutes of drawing manga-style roses before she was out of steam.
Zoey managed a shower next and put on a pretty strawberry-print dress she’d bought before life went south. It wasn’t as cute now that she had an extra thirty-five pounds straining against it in all directions, but with no one important to meet, why not wear it one last time? She put on some pink eye shadow next, the pep from earlier fighting with the growing feeling that she looked like a parody of her former self. She avoided looking at all of her at once- if she actually saw all the fatigue and the acne from days of stress and nights of greasy takeout, it would just take the wind out of her sails, and why do that? There might’ve been a version of her that cared enough to hide it all with foundation, but she wasn’t here tonight. Oh well- she might’ve been an ill-kept blob, but at least she’d die somewhat less ugly than she would’ve otherwise. She left the bathroom, put her suicide note in her tote bag, slung it over her shoulder, and left.
The bus was relatively empty, and once Zoey was sitting on it, that energy from earlier was starting to feel like nerves. She had to suppress herself from trembling. Maybe her meds were giving her a hypomanic episode? Well, didn’t matter- no work or relationships or money for it to mess up. She was on her way to the bus stop across from her work, same place she’d nearly been hit last time. But she wasn’t going to be running just a few yards from a city walkway and hoping for the best- if she were, she could’ve done it a lot closer to home. Instead, she’d be walking maybe a quarter mile or two from the bus stop to a freeway- seven lanes going each direction, all going sixty miles an hour and expecting no pedestrians. If she waited for when a truck was coming and ran… no way she’d make it to the other side, right?
The thought made Zoey wince. Dying sounded like a good idea, but actually making it happen? She hoped she’d have the spine to- it sounded scary.
The bus stopped. A woman and a little girl with her mom’s fingers in one hand and a sketchbook in the other got onto the bus.
Oh… I’m not going to see my mom again. And those flowers are the last thing I’ll ever draw.
Zoey had visited her mom last weekend, like she did most weekends. They’d crocheted and watched television and eaten homemade cookies, and taken Buttons- her mom’s 14-year-old little Shih Tzu- to the dog park. And then they’d hugged goodbye- just goodbye until next weekend, unless something came up. Neither of them had much going on in their lives (and soon her mom would have even less), so they were available to spend a lot of time together.
Zoey was shaking now. Holding her shoulders to try and make it stop. Tears came and she couldn’t hold them back. Oh, well- who cared if a few strangers saw her, right? Nothing that would matter soon, right?
It’s bad… I shouldn’t be listening to myself while it’s bad… right? …What am I doing…?
The bus reached Zoey’s stop. She could see her workplace from it as she got off. I’ve wanted to do this on and off for months. I should just… get it over with already. Stop dragging it out. Her feet started moving toward the freeway. The closer Zoey got, the more she lost her nerve. Before long, she could see it, overlooking a supermarket, some abandoned lots, and an abandoned building. Cars rushed across it. Semis. It made her want to start crying all over again. She needed somewhere private to calm her nerves.
The abandoned building tempted her as she walked past it. There was no one close by enough to see her go in, and though most of the ground-level windows were boarded up, the boards had fallen from one of them, leaving enough room to crawl through.
Well… might as well… she thought.
The inside wasn’t the empty husk Zoey expected. Instead, it was filled with rows of still-intact cubicles- dusty, but furnished. Desks covered in grime and papers too old to be readable, monitors that must’ve been way too old to work… it was like the owner had died and no one had come to pick up the pieces.
Zoey sat down in one of the ripped, damp office chairs and took her sketchbook out of her tote. If she was going to take some time to steel herself, then, well… it was stupid, but she might as well draw her silly comic character one last time. Even if she only ever worked on it on the weekends anymore, and way too slowly to ever publish it, it felt right.
Pencil hit paper, and almost nothing happened. The energy from before was gone, and even a few lines in, Zoey felt herself stalling to stare into space. There was a weird headset on the desk- like a VR thing. She put it on, and a blinding light flashed in her eyes.
-
“...And then I was here,” Gangle finished, head buried in her knees again. “And I thought I was only here.” Her voice hitched. “But now I know my mom probably had to see me spread across three different lanes!” By the end, her voice was a full octave higher than usual. She hugged Zooble with force, knocking them against the back of the bedframe.
Zooble hugged her back. “Hey, you don’t know that,” they said, trying to find some comforting words. “You kept on putting it off. The cake, the dress, drawing in the abandoned building… you did not want to do it. And you haven’t abstracted here. You're tougher than you think.”
“Yeah. Yeah… I really hope the real me is okay.”
“Yeah. I hope so, too.”
Gangle went limp in Zooble’s arms. Even if hope was all they could do, at least they could do it together.
