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Once after a Blue Moon

Note: Giselle Merrier present in this story is not to be confused with the writer, who shares her name with the caracter; they are two different entities.

She stared at me again amidst the snowfall. The black arcane eyes, the tender sanguine lips curved into a modest smile, the blonde hair so pale it seemed like silver...; the same Giselle Merrier that had been stalking me along my trail.

It’s not that I was intimidated by her presence. No, Giselle didn’t seem like a girl who could, in any way, intimidate. Her petite—not actually short, but slender—body itself appeared too fragile to even daunt a child. Her somewhat oversized hoodless parka didn’t help either. And then there’s her smile; so tender anyone could probably fall in love with her in a glance… if only one didn’t see her in every couple of minutes or so.

It’s not that she was daunting. It’s just that she seemed to be everywhere.

I turned my gaze away and quickened my pace.

First time she appeared was just out of the Bunkers, where I found her standing on my way in a somewhat uncivil manner.

“Hello? Can I help you?”

“No, it is you who’s in need of help.”

“Well, can’t you at least introduce yourself and start a proper conversation instead of staring at me like a famished bird of prey?”

“Fine. I’m Giselle Merrier. You better note that, since you’ll be seeing me often.” Then she disappeared behind a series of dead growths, only to be seen somewhere else just a moment later.

Since that unlikely meeting some hours ago, Giselle had been following me wherever I went. She was there behind a window up high, smiling at me. She was there seated on a distant bench, smiling at me. She was there in the broken mirror when I groomed, smiling at me. Now I could hear her footsteps in crude harmony with mine, only a few metres behind. And I didn’t need to look back to know that there was still a smile on her fair lady’s face.

The snowfall was getting thicker. Furthermore, dense mist was hanging in the air as a result of the ominous weather. Together with the chilling cold and the muffled footsteps of the girl, all these made the atmosphere seemed unreal… if not downright ghastly.

A wind blew against my chest, as if shooing me from my course with its unfriendly whistling noise.

Just as I stopped to obey what the weather had ordered me to do, Giselle’s cold breath puffed on my shoulder. I shrieked in alarm, and there she was, right behind me, her eerily hospitable smile still fixed on the face like dry paint on a canvas.

“You’re not going to make it to the Bunkers if you keep pushing through this weather, you see. Odd of you not having thought of that,” spoke the stalker at last. Since after my first encounter with her, I hadn’t heard Giselle say anything until just now.

“And that’s also odd of you to follow me in my rather risky excursion.”

She chuckled. I wonder how her ears could endure unscathed without a proper earflapped hat—in truth, not even a hat at all—as she clearly had grasped my words without any difficulty despite the cold. “But Darling,” she said, “that’s what I’m here for.”

“For following me? Then I think you’re a lunatic.”

Yet my offence didn’t cause even the slightest swerve on her smile. “No, it’s not me,” denied her. Before I could grasp what she meant with that, though, she quickly spoke again. “Let’s just find a shelter first and we’ll discuss about it later, shall we?”

We were in an abandoned town when the snowfall was worsening. That’s fortunate; towns had buildings, and a building made a decent shelter. Thus I searched and found a two-story building with a conveniently shattered window nearby, from which I easily broke into the relative safety of the interior. Giselle, though, I found inside without having to break through the window... or perhaps I just didn’t hear her making the entry.

I lit my torch with a loud click. As newfound light filled the forsaken room, I discovered that the building used to be a rather fancy floristry. The flowers for sale here were long dead as expected, but at least I could take the seeds for a greener bunker when I arrived later.

What about this building that deserved the most attention, though, was that it had a hearth. An overwhelmingly good, potentially warm hearth amidst the cold! I pulled some firewood out of my hammerspace backpack and put them against the remaining soot and ash of the fireplace. Then, as pleasant fire started to crackle on its fuel, the room glowed with a warm atmosphere that felt like heaven compared to the thick damp air of the Bunkers.

“Want some?”, I offered Giselle what edible seeds available that I was roasting on the fire. I did have some more filling food, but then I wasn’t yet starving.

The fair girl shook her head.

“That’s also odd.” I threw the cooked seeds into my mouth and began crunching them with my teeth. “You seem to have superhuman constitution.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps. In one way or another.”

The snowfall grew into a storm outside as icy winds blew through the shattered window. Instantly I covered that window with a cabinet I found nearby, just to diminish the unsettling windy noise. Giselle was right. I wouldn’t survive for long out there. We weren’t yet close to the Bunkers either.

“I think we shall spend the night here,” I said.

Giselle nodded. Surprisingly, the smile on her face had disappeared. What’s left there was an effete flat-mouthed and worried-eyes expression that, to an extent, looked like a display of sympathy. As if the former smile had only been a medium by which she wordlessly declared “I mean you no harm” and gained my trust; now what she wanted she had acquired, the medium turned obsolete. However, I didn’t feel like I was being manipulated. What sympathy now expressed on her face seemed genuine, and evidently it was directed toward me as well. I hadn’t actually known who this fair girl was, but I was starting to think she did have a purpose for following me around.

Gazing at what view the other windows offered, Giselle broke the silence with her inquiry: “I presume you are sentimentally linked to this town?”

A slight shiver shook my neck. “How do you know?”

“Well,” she sat beside my by the warm hearth, “one doesn’t simply scavenge here without being sent to. Especially when the one scavenging is all alone.”

“Especially when the weather is not at all friendly either,” I added. “Yea, you’re right. I do have some memories of the place.”

The town was my birthplace. I spent the first ten years of my life here, before I and my family moved into another, more urban place. We still kept our original house as a villa, though, and often went there when holidays came.

The view was majestic from that house. I used to love sitting on its veranda, where I could just drink a mug of chocolate and muse upon the magnific chain of mountains in the horizon. My little sister tended to appear whenever I did that. Then she’d ask something about the mountains, and darjeeling! she never ran out of questions. “Why are they tall?” “How did they form?” “What are there on the mountains?”

But the last time she asked I could regard her as “little” no more. Her question then was… if I could help her realise her long-kept dream of scaling those mountains.

She never actually carried out that dream.

Since that’s when the Blue Moons came and massacred most of us, leaving the survivors to hide in bunkers scattered all over the country. I, among many—but few compared to the dead—others, was one of these survivors. Nobody knew why the Blue Moons hadn’t eradicated these survivors; it’s not that our bunkers were truly hidden after all. Perhaps those rogue androids were busy building a new civilization of their own. Or perhaps mass-producing themselves. Either way our future couldn’t be very bright.

“Blue Moons,” muttered Giselle.

“Yea, them.” I paused. “They were what happened to me. Needless to say.”

She nodded. “Of all the things that could happen, those androids turned on their masters,” murmured Giselle. “Just as in the films. How unlikely.”

“Stranger is that they decided to manufacture such problematic things in the first place.”

Giselle chuckled. “It’s called ‘Project Blue Moon’ after all.” There was a moment of silence as Giselle seemed to muse upon her own past. Then, having none else to say, she whispered, “I know how you feel.”

“No, you don’t,” I denied. “You’re not me.”

“Well,” she looked at me and smiled, “you haven’t the slightest idea, Darling.”

Straightaway I realised that I could have made a mistake. This fair girl must had encountered the Blue Moons as had everybody else, and who was I to say her misfortune was unlike my own? Thus I asked her, “Would you tell me what happened to you?”, and hoped she would take the question as an apology.

Giselle only shook her head, slowly as in a deep contemplation. “It’s hard to say... but you’ll find it out.” She smiled warmly again. “The bottom line is, I do know how you feel... even to the tiniest details of it.” It was rather difficult to believe in her statement if it weren’t for her eyes: too honest to be the eyes of a mere little white lie.

After another long moment of silence, I and Giselle decided to call it a night. We took a minute to pray for a safe sleep, lest one of those Blue Moons wander by, and made turns for the night watch.

As yet another oddity, the fair girl ultimately chose to keep watch all night long instead.

And I fell to sleep shortly after.

Absurd images swirled in my head as that night’s dream surfaced: a skull on a mountainside, dying ghouls struggling for life in a dungeon prison, a pair of blue moons that make the eyes of an all-seeing night sky….

…And a flash of Giselle’s radiant smile that put my rest back into ease.

For a while.

Instantly after the oneiric bliss diminished, horror again took its stead... and this time it was vivid.

Shrill cries and violent douses began ringing in my ears as I found myself enclosed in dense silvery mist, sightless, but not oblivious. There was a slaughter behind this misty curtain, thus the horrid babel told me. The slaughtered ones were those whom I held dear, thus their helpless voice told me. And the slaughterers: those rogue androids, thus the occasional bluish glow and the low hum of digital circuitry behind the mist told me.

It emerged again: the memory of that agonizing day, teasing me with the irreparable loss I’d suffered in these nightmares I had to experience every night, again and again. As if this dark memory was laughing at me for my weakness. Yes, the memory did know how pathetic I was. It saw me witnessing their deaths. It saw me cowering in fear, moving not a finger to help. It saw me fleeing the scene instead of coming to their rescue. And yes, It had seen my true face; the unpretentious, unmasked self that would only surface when one was faced with the worst of circumstances… and mine was undoubtedly a true coward! And now it’s mocking me; it’s forcing my ears to hear these tormenting voices one more time, as if hearing them once on that bloody day wasn’t enough to drive out my sanity!

…Yet it wasn’t forcing me to see.

The mist; it’s keeping the malicious view at bay.

Now that had never happened before. Whatever this silvery curtain was, it knew what I needed: this little comfort I gained from blindness. It was trying to keep me sane despite the magnitude of my guilt. As if there was a battle running in the deepest realm of my mind: one party wanted me to acknowledge my sin and suffer for it; whilst the other, this novel force showing up afterward, was assuring me otherwise: that the tragedy had never been my fault, and this torment was not a thing I deserved.

Nonetheless, this new force was waning. It had been so hopeful, but it seemed like something else out of its control was coming; something so terrible that even this force must bow for a reason I had yet to know. Even now the silvery mist was decreasing, letting the ominous blue lights behind glow brighter and brighter.

And nearer. And nearer.

Until a face formed amidst the turmoil of lights.

There it was. A Blue Moon before me. Never had a machine bore as much resemblance to a live human as these androids did: to an extent where even the mere spectacle of it inspired both marvel and disturbance.

Marvelous because it was near-perfect, yet also disturbing for the same reason.

Just look at how it smiled: there was something indescribably wrong with the curve of its lips, however minute the deviation. The manner of its walking was not right either. Its steps were too rigid and its pace too steady. Virtually every pattern of its movement was predictable, and that, no matter how astounding, was nowhere close to human.

But still, I couldn’t predict its intention as it approached with its steady, unperturbed saunter. The only clue I had was that its eyes glared bright blue… and that couldn’t mean any good.

It stopped right in front of me, lowering its eerie face only to gaze straight into my eyes.

And in that seemingly eternal moment, everything turned blue.…

Darling, how I missed silver that second.

Then Giselle’s voice echoed in the air, blurring the blue everything and jolting my eyes open to the dim light of the awake world.

Strands of her hair were dangling close to my face as Giselle’s own was hanging by only inches above.

And darling… those fair strands were silver.

“Rise,” she said gravely.

I did what she said, not in obedience, but rather in a compulsion to rise I myself felt.

I looked around to take a better grasp of the situation. The fire on the hearth was still going though much smaller, but there were other sources of light compensating the fire’s decrease. There I noticed that dawn was breaking outside, with little beams of its scanty light pouring in through the upper halves of the windows—as, unfortunately, piles of snow had covered their lower halves.

It would have been a normal dawn if it wasn’t for the alarm on Giselle’s countenance; she stood as firm as a statue and her eyes glowered at the windows.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Just listen,” she answered.

There was practically no noise; even the fire was too small to make a crackle. Such a silence was disturbing in a place this cold and dark... until my ears adjusted to it, and gradually the sound of my own breathing dominated my sense of hearing. Strange. My ears wouldn’t focus this much on my own should I hear Giselle’s as well. Why couldn’t I hear her breathing in such a silent condition? Did she even... breathe?

Another noise, this one much fainter, caught my attention: a distant low hum. A noise so distinct, familiar yet agitating, that I just couldn’t mistake its origin. That instant I understood why Giselle was so alarmed, and why the silvery mist chose to let a Blue Moon reach me last dream: it was merely warning me against the coming of a real one.

“Lie down,” Giselle whispered into my ear.

The hum growing more audible, now I could hear the android’s muffled footsteps. And I remembered a thing about those inhuman feet. Darling, I saw one of those feet blast down a door in one kick....

“Lie down!” Giselle raised her voice.

But I could not. Horrible pictures kept appearing in my head after that of their feet. One flash of memory was of their left hand, which could morph into an array of tools. I once saw one morphed into a hammer and one into a drill. Both were barbarically misused. I wonder if they had any idea of how cruel they were to my kins. Perhaps they had to taste their own evil, just so they would know.

...Darling, how I wished to see a dent or a hole on their alloy skull. How I wished to see those circuits beneath sparked and burned, and broken into splinter and shards! But there, they shouldn’t die that quickly, for also I wished to see them writhing in helplessness. I wanted them to beg for human mercy! Yet I wanted them to beg in vain, as that humanity they implored they had stolen themselves!

Yes, they had to taste their own evil!

“Would you please lie down for goodness’ sake?!” Giselle whined.

Oh, good Giselle. There I wondered once more if she did know what agony I had gone through....

For I wouldn’t hide from that engineered wretch. Not again. No more running away. Not even waiting for that wretch to confront me. Why, I would confront it myself, since it was I who had received its evil, and this evil I should return that wretch!

“Confound it! Lie down!”

“No!” thundered I.

I pulled a rail-pistol and fired it at a locked door, causing a sudden bang to echo through the area.

“You foolish clot!” Giselle cursed and gripped me, hindering my attempt to exit the door.

“But I have to dispatch that thing!” I said, trying to break free from her surprisingly strong grapple. “I’ve had enough of cowering in fear!”

The wretch outside took on a faster pace, and it was clearly steering toward us.

“You didn’t have to do that!” Giselle cried in terror. “And what are you to do next? Try to get past the pile of snow behind that door?! We’re trapped here, dingbat! It’s not you who are going; it’s that thing who’s coming for us!”

The electronic hum was nightmarishly near that moment, and then there was a digging noise outside.

“You should have minded your temper!” Giselle screamed.

“And so should you!” I threw her a punch.

But Giselle countered it with a rapid jab to the neck. Having me in a daze, she then dragged me away from the door....

...Which blasted down in a single wham the next minute.

And there it was again. The pale plastic skin, the worn and torn trademarked uniform, the rigid strands of synthetic hair, and the indifferent physiognomy of pre-programmed savagery... along with its blue glowing eyes; the terror itself, now had arisen from the depths of my nightmare to the tangible awake world.

The wretch gazed about the room from where it stood on, illuminating whatever it saw with its blue piercing light. Apparently those lights could function as a torch in addition to its normal aesthetic—or, as I would prefer to say, terror-affliction—purpose. Those blue lights never served as a good omen. And now I saw those beams of blue flickering through the room, looking for no other than me; the cause of the bang.

Thus the lights went. Flicker, flicker, flicker. And every time those lights passed near, it felt like my pounding heart would stop anytime soon. Perhaps a minute had passed whilst those lights wavered to and fro. I had no idea. Time was running so slow….

…Until those piercing eyes finally met mine, and the beams made a bridge of blue between our eyes.

But that was a good thing.

Since that blue eye, that vulnerable window into its core, was in my crosshairs.

A much louder bang crackled through the place as my rail-rifle fired straight into the eye, shattering it into shards and splinters of melting scraps. The severe rupture exposing the intricate circuitry within its skull, tiny sparks flew from it before the now-monocular wretch collapsed hard onto its knee, and ultimately fell to the floor. Its low hum and the glow of its remaining eye, ceased.

I emerged from my hiding spot in surprised triumph.

That scrap on the floor was the first Blue Moon I had ever dispatched. Of all the odds! It seemed like a miracle! And it would have been impossible should I had decided to straightforwardly confront the wretch and therefore expose myself!

But instantly I remembered that, in truth, I had. That time when I shot at the door; I had. I’d risked myself to face a duel whose winner had already been ascribed. How would I win against that alloy-layered wretch? Moreover, with only a pistol in hand?

“Giselle…” I couldn’t help but address her, “I think you have saved my life.”

She looked at me sideways.

“If you didn’t drag me away I wouldn’t even have thought about the rifle,” I said. “Beside that, by hiding, I got the chance to shoot first. My gratitude.”

Giselle smiled her usual smile.

“You were right, you see. I should have minded my temper at times like that.”

“Oh, don’t fret that,” she laughed, “it was merely my duty.”

“…Duty?”

She nodded. “To keep you sane and sober, yes.”

I could but smile with her when I heard that. She? Had a duty concerning me? Now just who was this girl…? But I soon shrugged the questions off, deemed those words an act of civility, and moved on.

The weather was friendly that morning. We continued our trek to the Bunkers as soon as I finished consuming my ration for breakfast. Giselle, as I had guessed, didn’t ask for her portion and neither did she seem like in need of it.

“Don’t you want at least a gulp of water?”

She shook her head. “No. You’ll need it.”

Thus we left the abandoned floristry. Our walk went on and on with our monotonous tread through snow, at times knee-deep and at times ankle-deep. I still had a long journey ahead, the ground was covered with snow, and the remnants of the snowstorm coldness hadn’t left the air. The daylight, though, however bleak it was, made it all more bearable.

A length of time passed without a word uttered. Perhaps one hour. Or more.

“You do this often, don’t you?” I finally asked.

Giselle made a sidelong glance. “What?”

“Walking with a stranger.” I took a while arranging my next words. “I mean, you can walk with me, whilst saying nothing, and you don’t seem at all nervous. It’s like you’ve done this for a number of times.”

She shook her head. “No. It’s just that you’re not a stranger.”

As I had learned not to argue with her unbelievable statements, there was another silence.

“So,” I started again, “if I am not a stranger to you, what do you know about me?”

Now she chuckled. “Why, everything.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

Another monotonous silence. Surprisingly, I started to feel nervous myself. I might not be a stranger to this allegedly-omniscient girl, but she was to me.

“Say, then,” I said, interested in testing that omniscience of hers, “why did I go to the town in the first place?”

She made another sidelong glance, this time a bit fiercer. “You don’t trust me?”

“Until you can prove you do know something unsaid about me, I don’t.”

Giselle frowned in annoyance; not really angry, it’s just like a kid who wasn’t allowed to play with her toy. “Fine,” she said, “you didn’t go to actually scavenge for supplies. You went there to recover a photograph of your sister.”

And she was correct!

She continued, “You went with an optimism that, whatever the Blue Moons had done to the town, they wouldn’t be concerned about personal photographs. And your intuition turned out right. In that villa with the mountainous vista, you found a paper-sized photograph of her. You imagined that there would have been more pictures of her if you visited your house in that urban city, but the circumstances didn’t allow you. Thus you started your return trek to the Bunkers, but then the snowstorm came and you had to take shelter in the floristry.” She stopped her quick narration without taking a breath.

And yes, all of it was correct. Even I thought I didn’t need to say a thing to describe my awe; she would have grasped that as well.

“So,” I finally decided what to say, “I suppose it’s because you’ve been following me in my whole excursion?” But I myself doubted that. She narrated my thought to visit my house in the urban city, and that was impossible to be inferred purely from an observation of acts. It was my thought. Did she somehow, in a sense, get inside me?

Yet Giselle only replied, “Darling, I’ve been with you all the time.”

“Which, specifically, is from?”

“All the time!” She paused. “And all the times.”

“All the time and all the times,” I felt obliged to repeat.

“Yes.”

“You love talking in riddles, don’t you?”

Giselle tee-heed.

Our journey went on in relative silence. After some good hours of knowing her, I developed a close connection to the girl, but then I had no idea what I should talk about along the trek. If she did know everything I had in mind, what use was then to talk? It was, as everything else since Giselle appeared, odd. Yet, as odd as it might seem, it provided me with a comforting sense of security as well. Here I was walking with someone who could fully understand me without having to probe; it’s like one major need in your life had been fulfilled.

And thus hours of exhausting walk, interspersed with thirty-minute rests, passed before we arrived at the Bunkers in the afternoon.

“Welcome back,” I spoke to myself. Then, turning to Giselle, “You live here as well?”

“I live wherever you do,” she answered in riddles again.

I entered and walked down the stairs to our huge underground fort, where all the necessities of life, at least for a season to come, was provided. The heat and scent of human life instantly fumed through the air as I opened the main door. There again were the busy lives of men, struggling for no other than to prolong those lives they were having. And I, yet another human, stepped back into this messed-up tangle hoping for no other than a place of security. Too bad security and solitude—which meant peace of mind to me—didn’t go along here.

I quickened my pace. I never liked walking through crowds, and I preferred spending the least time possible in doing it when I had to. Still, it would take about seven minutes to walk from the junction (the place you got to by walking down the entry stairs) to the living quarters. But in a damp place like this, where the only sights you could get were of grimy walls, scatters of rubbish, and a heap of men in disarray, even that seven minutes walk were a period that I would like to reduce.

“This is another reason why I decided to go out,” I said instinctively as I paced through the crowds. “Now, Giselle, which room is yours?”

...Yet there was no answer.

“Giselle...?”

It took me a moment to realise that the fair girl wasn’t there.

And instantly I was engulfed in panic. Had I taken a while to think about it, I would have thought that normal: perhaps she had just parted toward her own room without me noticing it.... But I hadn’t. I couldn’t. The shock was just unmanageable. It felt like something essential was torn away from me, although I knew not what. Then was it this girl? Was Giselle, an acquaintance I’d just known yesterday, essential? How absurd this was, yet it seemed to be true. She had been my saviour and my confidant, and she knew both what’s overt and covert of me; such a person you would not encounter twice in a lifetime... and now I had lost her? I couldn’t take that!

“Giselle!” I shouted, my voice muffled by those of the throng. “Does anyone see Giselle?!”

Some people turned their heads. None of them responded with words; only unconcerned headshakes and indifferent stares.

Then I ran, retracing my path from when I first entered the Bunkers. Between those frenzied steps I shouted and cried Giselle’s name at the top of my lungs, yet to no avail. This overwhelming worry for her at that moment, however illogical, made sense to me as what I ought to feel, and the reckless runabout what I ought to do. I could think of nothing else.

Ultimately I scaled the stairway, exited the Bunkers, and found myself back outdoors. A security officer, alarmed by my hurriedness, thus accosted me.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a girl!” I said. “Not short but small, silverish blonde, with a rather oversized parka. Seen her?”

The officer made a slight frown. “I think I’ve never seen such girl,” he answered irresolutely. “When did you last see her?”

“She was with me when I entered the Bunkers,” I recalled.

And there the officer looked genuinely perplexed. “She was?”

“She was!”

He made a slow turn in place, as in thought, and asked me again. “You sure? Because I saw you coming, and you were alone.”

“No, you didn’t! You weren’t here when I came.”

“But I was reading a book under that tree there when I heard you coming. Of course you didn’t see me, but I saw you, and I swear you were with nobody!”

“What?”

“What’s what? Here; I saw you coming, then you said ‘welcome back’ and ‘you live here as well?’ to yourself, and finally you went downst—” He paused abruptly. A sense of understanding seemed to come upon him before he spoke again, this time much calmer, “Or were you talking to your silver-blond fellow back there...? Then I believe you’ve been seeing things, my friend.”

I fell into dumbness at that.

Then, ignoring the officer’s shouts that I better see a doctor, I dashed to the fields whence I had come. A new wave of shock engulfed me, and this time it felt so foreign. The officer’s explanation was light shed unto my puzzle, yet this very light exposed as well a much bigger puzzle, to which the whole former puzzle was merely a jigsaw piece. But this puzzle I had not the audacity to solve. I couldn’t think straight. I just wanted to run as far as I could, to some unknown place where I could writhe, and squirm, and shout, and cry... in serene solitude.

Yet I ran out of breath and thus fell to the hard ground.

And there, whilst I replenished my lungs, a thought suddenly came upon me.

I produced the photograph I had found yesterday and stared at it.

“Why hadn’t I noticed this?” I asked myself....

For the girl in the photograph, my dearest sister, save for her younger age and darker hair colour... looked just like Giselle.

“Who are you?!” I asked, specifying not to whom the question was addressed.

Thus I writhed, and squirmed, and shouted, and cried in distressing loneliness. In such an emotional turmoil, solitude became threatening, and quietness was like an ill omen. Straightaway I loathed this state of being alone, though not five minutes ago I had yearned for the very thing. Now I wanted the opposite. I wanted people to be here! I wanted them to hear, to see, to tell me that I wasn’t alone in this delirium—but no! It wouldn’t happen, since people wouldn’t care! Who would suffer bear my trouble after all?! Who would uderstand me at the very least?! Nobody would! Nobody except myself—!

...And Giselle.

...But if nobody else could see her, wasn’t Giselle only a spectre, and I hallucinating?

Then she didn’t exist.

My mind started to settle in the face of these thoughts.

Nobody except myself would understand me. Giselle understood me, but she didn’t really exist. Then wasn’t her... in a sense or another, myself?

“You are not wrong.”

And just after my little epiphany, the mystery girl presented herself again before me.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t appear where there were other people,” said she again.

I stared at her. “You don’t exist” was all I could think of saying, though I didn’t say it. I knew she could hear my thoughts after all. I knew she would reply.

“Well, I’m only a product of your lunacy,” she said, with those sympathetic eyes cast down upon me, “but why say I don’t?”

“So that’s it, huh?” I murmured, “I’m a lunatic?”

A terrible pang crept under my chest. I had believed that I’d found a person whom I could call a bosom friend. I had believed that, after those tragedies the Blue Moons had brought about, I could finally find refuge in the presence of this girl. I had thought a turn of events for the better was finally happening. I had trusted her... but then even her mere existence was a lie.

A lie I myself had made, unawarely, as a product of my lunacy.

“Yes, you are,” Giselle’s answer interrupted my thought, “but I’m keeping you as close as I can to sanity.”

“As close as you can,” I repeated, “to sanity.”

Somehow, those words sounded obnoxious. How could she say so? How could an unreal person, a lie my unconscious made, a “product of lunacy”, help me stand as closest as I could to sanity? My admiration for her ceased drastically at the thought of this, replaced by a growing anger that urged and itched... for this conceited spectre sure needed a punishment.

I cried and threw a punch to her face.

It hit her.

Yet somehow, it hit me as well.

I fell to the ground writhing in pain.

“Why did you do that?!” Giselle wailed. “You’re hurting yourself!”

“I hate you,” I cried.

She was startled at that, yet her fair eyes didn’t glare. Neither wrath nor irritation marred her visage. She only gazed at me in silence, and when she had arranged her words, the tone of both her sight and her voice turned into that of earnest concern. “...I’m a shard of you, Darling. Then you hate yourself, while this shard wholly cares about you?”

“I don’t want your affection!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re no other than myself! Am I so unfortunate that none cares about me but a shard of my own self?!”

“...Yet what’s wrong with it? Darling, I know that many want a close companion who shall shower them with affection and whom they can regard as their own, but then, as that companion has her own self, you can’t expect her to be selfless. Now here I am different. I don’t have my own self. I am a shard of your self that truly cares for you, and you are lucky to have this shard manifested as a tangible spectre.... You are very lucky indeed.”

“Still... you don’t exis—”

“I do!” Giselle yelled that with utmost graveness.

“You say you’re a product of my lunacy!”

“And does that make me inexistent? I’m here talking to you. How can I not exist?”

“Only I see you, Giselle! You only live in my mind, don’t you?! Because I’m a madman?”

“Oh, Dear.... Yes, I live in your mind; then how does that nullify my existence? Should I live in the real world before you can say I exist?”

“...Yes.”

Giselle chuckled at that. “As if there is a real world. As if there is a reality external to you, shared in the minds of all who live in it. As if things have to be part of that reality to be deemed existent.” She gently shook her head. “No, Darling. I only have to be a part of your internal reality—a part of your mind.”

“But mine is the internal reality of a lunatic,” I muttered.

“Even if you were not a lunatic, how could you be certain that you weren’t simply a brain in a vat, and your reality not induced by a machine, connected to that brain only to deliver false stimuli? ...There’s no way to prove the existence of that external reality, Dear. What exists is what exists in your mind, and I do.”

I didn’t know if I should deem her explanation a nonsense. What I knew was, I did want it to be correct. I would love to believe that this mystery girl was existent... and apparently she was. Allegedly she was. Hopefully she was. After all, as the girl was a shard of my self, didn’t it mean that her thoughts were in truth mine? That some submerged part of my mind reasoned exactly as Giselle did? Didn’t it mean that, if I really wanted to, I could turn to believe what she believed?

Thus, not knowing what to say, I asked: “Why?”

“Why, you asked?”

“Yes! Why all of this? Why did you come to me in the first place?!”

Giselle smiled as she did when I’d first seen her. Clearly that was a question she would gladly answer, and this time not in riddles. “Don’t you see it in my name? I come with a purpose to make you merrier. I see you’ve lost the people you held dearest...; it’s not that I can replace them, but I’m trying to diminish its aftermath. I’m trying to keep you from breaking down, to keep you as close to sanity as I can, by showering my affection to you—by giving you what you were deprived of....” She paused. Her gaze lowered, as in occasional diffidence one would experience in the face of an adored other, before she finally spoke again. “And I’m trying as hard as I can. So, would you... at least, let me do this to you—my purpose?”

We stood in silence as I pondered her request. Somehow my turmoil ceased at the tone of her words; it was another one of her genuine expressions that had always charmed, and steadied, and lulled my heart. My emotions still stirred, that hadn’t changed, but my trust to her was evidently growing back into prominence. Furthermore, now it was mixed with a sort of passion: I wanted her to be here, and I wanted her to smile and glow, to see through my eyes and acknowledge what lied behind, to soothe me in my sorrows, to keep me thinking straight in agitation, and basically do all those good conducts she did. Thus, fully aware that the fair girl was here and now by my side, smiling and glowing too, I’d never felt so grateful.

Yet one thing still urged in my mind.... One final little thing that, once fulfilled, would increase my trust toward her to the fullest. Just one little-big request this thing was...: “Prove me.”

Giselle raised her head again.

I quickly restated my words before she could say anything. “Prove me you exist. Prove me your affection. Prove me your purpose. Prove me everything.”

Then she gazed at me; a tender gaze through the eyes, just what she was adept at, to unveil what I left unsaid. And there she knew that words were not needed. Why, she knew how fed up I was with the complexity of words. And shouldn’t she know that complexity was a folly unless it was concluded with simplicity? Yes, I knew that she knew. By the good radiance of her new smile, I knew.

Thus Giselle’s answer was simple: her slowly approaching me, her gently embracing, and her suddenly pressing her lips against mine; tangibly, affectionately, and resolutely—this simple act dissolved all my doubts.

Hence, in bliss was I convinced, and in bliss I accepted her being.

End

#short story #solipsism #autoromance