Story Excerpt
False Light
by MB Valente
The psychiatrist’s face was a distant gray blob, his voice muffled. Wey blinked and shook her head. She leaned across the transparent floating coffee table and said, “What?”
“I said that sounds worrisome.”
Wey nodded and looked at the window. It was a wheat field ruffled by wind, slurry green mountains sandwiched between the rippling gold and an aggressively blue sky. On the far side of the table, the blob that was Dr. Kulver was listing off nonsense words, possibly the names of medications.
“Oh yes, all that,” Wey said.
“Well, I think it’s too much.”
There was something disturbing about the window. Something experimental—it reeked of clinical trials.
“Nice wheat field. Is . . . it new?”
Her tongue was a dry, itching coil. There was an empty water glass but no pitcher on the table between them.
“Please try and concentrate, Ms. Wey. If I take you on as a patient, I’ll want to reduce your dosage and potentially take you off some of these drugs altogether. There are risks associated with—”
Wey leaned into the window until her forehead almost touched its warm, humming surface. Then she drew back and spun to face Kulver, her pupils terrified pinpricks. He made a note on his tablet.
“There’s something in there,” she whispered.
“Out there,” he corrected her without looking up. “It’s a new concept we’re trying. Well. A very old concept, I suppose. We think certain patients with claustrophobia or similar conditions might benefit from being able to visualize themselves in a different space.”
“A different space . . .” She reached out and ran a finger over the tiny Wey that was standing in the field, her black block of hair lifted by the same breeze caressing the wheat. Like the Wey in the office, she wore a rumpled tunic and overlarge gray sweatpants she hadn’t realized she’d left the apartment in. Kulver set down the tablet and crossed his arms.
“I’d have thought you’d be familiar. It’s your line of work, after all. You told me you design views—do you never include pedestrians for atmosphere? Background wildlife?”
“No. Too disturbing. I never do animals or anything sentient. Let alone people.” Her own voice sounded far away. She stared into the expressionless mask of Wey in the field, who stared back.
“All this does is add the viewer’s image to the view. If you find it unsettling, I can easily turn it off.”
Wey in the field was snuffed out in a blink, and the wheat swayed on as if she’d never existed. Wey in the office flinched.
“I agree that it’s a good idea for you to change practitioners. The first thing I’d do is cut back on your medications. Your previous mental stability guarantor seems to have been quite irresponsible.”
“My boyfriend.” The throbbing in Wey’s head was making the room ripple. “Don’t worry,” she said, sensing distantly that Kulver’s mouth was hanging open in a little o of consternation, “We’re not together anymore.” Pause. “That’s why I’m here.”
“I see. Of course, he should have stopped treating you the moment you became involved.”
“Absolutely. He’s out now. Both as a shrink and . . .”
Wey felt herself sinking toward the table. The wheat in the window swayed on. Inside the wall behind it, intricate systems filtered the air, regulated temperature, and relayed information along countless wires that branched into finer and finer tendrils through all five thousand floors of the satellite. Above, below, and all around her, Stella spun peacefully on its axis, and beyond that only stars.
Wey left the office aware, now, that she was wearing dirty sweatpants cinched together at the waist in a golf-ball-sized knot of drawstrings. She would have to get over her mirror problem if she ever hoped to be accepted by polite society and expensive, reputable psychiatrists. She should also stop wearing Yon’s pants.
Dr. Kulver’s office was in Sector II, not far from Stella’s pulsing, thermonuclear heart. The access hall leading to his office was all slate tile caressed by fashionably dim honey light. As she shuffled down the corridor, shrinking back from a group of sleek-suited men toting briefcases, Wey tried to remember what Kulver had actually said. But all she could recall was the window—slick and over bright in a style she’d always hated, even without its unsettling gimmick.
Without being sure how she got there, Wey sank onto the bench of a w-bound tramway. Electric hum, hushed voices, hissing doors. Between ads, a clock showing 11:40 flashed across the ceiling screens. A teenager smoking quietly in a corner seat filled the tram with candy-scented steam. There would be another day to live through tomorrow, and another, and another. Wey let her head sink downward until the veins in her temples throbbed against her knees.
She was a little girl, staring as her father lifted his shirt to show a knotty web of scars. The sound of water falling. Somewhere flowers were singing.
Wey was startled awake by a harsh buzz announcing the end of the line. Sleep kept sneaking up like this, always hidden close and ready to plunge the knife. She had dozed through her stop and was now in some far-flung corridor kilometers from home. It took a complicated backtrack on three different tramlines to reach her own Sector IV block: garish, over-lit, vaguely unclean. Streams of people elbowed past wearing serving aprons and industrial blues, body-contorting leotards and tracksuits crawling with gifs—she no longer felt embarrassed about the sweatpants.
At last, she reached her side-hall, stepped over the legs of the man lying sprawled against the x-ward wall—mercifully asleep; she wouldn’t have to avoid his single eye as he told her for the hundredth time how he’d lost the other one—and keyed in her door code.
The apartment took her in and folded closed around her. Sour food smells, old vapor and oil. Her clothes weighed on her like lead, and she slumped onto the bed unable to imagine she’d ever wake up.
She did, though. Eventually she always had to. This time she was awoken by the sound of the front door hissing open and Yon bounding in.
His honey-blond hair was mussed, one too many shirt buttons undone. Jackal grin, arched brows that always made him look surprised or wicked. The smell of alcohol and home. He leaned over the bed to kiss her, but when he drew away, he was frowning.
“You weren’t there when I woke up this morning.”
“I felt like a walk.”
“I was worried. You were just gone. You know that’s messed up, right? You get that, don’t you?”
Thinking wistfully of the fictional world she’d created in Kulver’s office, Wey let her head fall back onto the pillow. The apartment ceiling was pink, she was disturbed to realize, as she’d never noticed before. Was it because she designed windows for a living, or was it the windows themselves, along with all the other wallscreens, that made one forget the actual walls? Their slapdash texture. Like work unfinished. Stella’s architects must have known all eyes would be drawn to those dancing pixels and so hadn’t even bothered to—
“Meïlin.” Yon was snapping his fingers in front of her nose. She slapped his hand away.
“Don’t. My head hurts enough as it is.”
She could feel her body tensing, the angry heat spreading. Something behind her eyeballs burned. His face split back into a feral grin and he grabbed the hand that had slapped, pulled her up and into an embrace. With her arms pinned to her sides and his mouth on her neck—the familiar falling—she felt the heat transform despite herself, willed it to turn back into rage. But she let him push her back onto the bed.
The next morning around 09:00, Wey woke up alone. A thin cloud of tobacco-flavored vapor and some residual warmth on the hub told her Yon had gone out not long before.
The room was still cast in the amber half-light she always slept in—40 stells cheaper than full dark. Clawing hair out of her face, she massaged her temples and tried to make the apartment come together into something representative and real.
It was a studio, largish by Sector IV standards, with enough space for a double bed and a kitchenette and a desk writhing with cables where her tablet, image generator, and keypad sat under a fine coat of dust. Every other free centimeter of space was stacked with canvases: some gessoed, some half-painted, some still that raw, pale ecru she loved and mourned even as her brush slopped over it. There were boxes packed with tubes of paint, linseed oil, biosimilar rabbit glue: rare treasures, foul-smelling magic. All her finished paintings were turned to the wall with only their crossed backs showing. The window over her desk was connected to her tablet so she could test her designs, but all the others were turned off.
The apartment was a mess and had been for weeks—it was unclear how many. The days had slurred together since she started taking Yon’s pills.
Pills. She had probably forgotten last night’s dose. The hub was programmed to assemble her prescriptions at the proper intervals, but its beep must have come while she slept. She stumbled across the room and yanked open the sliding panel. Sure enough, there was the little cup, but only half full. Wey stared at it, disconcerted, until she remembered that Kulver had said something about reducing her dosage.
Little exploding flower of panic. She spun and scanned the room. Satisfied that Yon had indeed gone out, she tossed back the pills, choking them down with a half-bottle of milk tea she found in the fridge.
There wasn’t much else in there besides the tea. Wey was too uneasy about her account balance to dare order anything fresh, so she made something like a meal from a handful of dehydrated mushrooms and an instant egg packet. The omelet was gritty: she’d been too impatient, the hunger too sudden, to fully dissolve the powder before grilling it. Her relief after choking it down made her think she hadn’t eaten for at least a day. As she chewed, the lights slowly brightened into a cheery, full-spectrum white that she hated but couldn’t program out: doctor’s orders. By the time the last grain of omelet was gone, she was feeling unusually clear, her vision almost sharp.
Maybe it was the change in dosage, or the horrible state-of-the-art window in Kulver’s office, but for whatever reason, she found herself sinking into her desk chair and powering up her tablet. She hadn’t opened any project files in over a month—she had no idea what she’d been working on, which due dates had come and gone, whether it was worth calling clients to find out if they still expected anything from her.
When the screen winked on, it was filled with a note that Yon had left open for her:
Don’t use me. Paint something real today!!!
Wey deleted the note and started opening folders and flipping through menus. She pulled up a project she barely remembered creating, though the metadata showed she’d started it only six weeks before. It was a view inspired by an OE landscape, some ancient painting she must have seen at Stella’s history museum. It showed a rain-tossed sky, pregnant with imminent thunder, hanging low over a gushing river and a march of black cliffs. A pine tree freshly split by lightning showed naked white where it had snapped in two. Wey glanced down at the invoice and winced: this was supposed to be for a window in a kindergarten. She flipped through a few other files to similar mortification. Some awoke vague memories of her shouting over the clink of ice in her glass that there was no point coddling these people, that beauty was dangerous, that dark made the light, while Yon shouted back that finally, finally she was making sense.
Other projects stirred no recollection whatsoever, and she stared at the sick, saturated greens of a subtropical jungle unable to imagine what she’d been thinking.
By the time she’d gone through all the files, it was nearly 14:00. She was wide awake now, electrically charged. Before Yon, designing windows had been the best way she’d found to make the world—all of Stella—fade into the background as she poured her mind into a rectangular pane and the space that might lie behind it. And she wanted that feeling now.
She dragged the stormy landscape into a new folder that she named INCOGNITA and opened reference images from an older project: an undulating prairie that she began to modify and rearrange, adding wildflowers, pearly mounds of cumulonimbus, sketching in a distant homestead or two in tones veering ever so slightly toward atmospheric blue so that, to the little kindergartners, their peaked roofs would appear lost in a hazy distance.
The days slipped past in a monotonous flood that Dr. Kulver approvingly called “controlled withdrawal.” Wey swallowed smaller and smaller handfuls of pills, removed the dust from each individual wire on her desk, worked on her kid-friendly prairie. The objects around her emerged from the fog and took on hard, crisp outlines. But even with this new clarity, she still wasn’t sure why she’d set an alarm for an ungodly hour, sneaked out of her apartment in the clothes she’d slept in and taken a tram halfway across Stella to see a shrink she could be certain that Yon didn’t know . . . only to end up pretending they’d broken up already, when in fact she needed Kulver to help her do it.
She was bound, trussed to Yon so long as he was her registered practitioner under Stella’s mandatory mental stability program. Seeing another psychiatrist behind his back felt a little like sleeping with someone behind his back—a betrayal that would eventually free her of him. Simpler even, though more expensive.
The only reason Yon wasn’t trussed to a psychiatrist was that somehow he was one. The unfairness of this had settled deeper into Wey the longer they were together.
She had met Yon Rychart a little over two years before, at her first appointment with him. Everything in his office had been the exact opposite of Dr. Kulver’s carefully neutral décor. They’d sat on mismatched plush armchairs dotted with vapor burns, a black and purple zebra-striped rug on the floor, a chakra chart pulsing on the wallscreen behind his head.
Despite the shabby furniture and neighborhood, he bowed her into his office like a fallen aristocrat. He was “charmed” to learn that—despite appearances—they spoke the same language, gushed over her rare bilingualism. His hair bounced in video-star waves, and the latest watch model flashed on his wrist as he beckoned her to a seat. He had the distracted courtesy of someone who’d grown up with money, maybe even came from a chic inner sector. His cheery demeanor had darkened, however, as she described Meïlin Wey’s petty troubles to the zebra rug: her friendless childhood, her father’s death, her career frustrations. By the time she finished her mumbled monologue, the man was actually tearing up.
“I’m not looking for sympathy or anything,” she said. “I just got flagged for trying to order too many sleep aids from my hub. Automatic mental stability screening. You know.”
“You were really brave to come, Meïlin.” Hadn’t she just told him she wasn’t there by choice? Still, something caught in her throat. He leaned forward and laid a hand on her arm with a timid smile that had a hungry, glinting edge. “Can I call you Meïlin? Please call me Yon. I think you’ve overcome a lot. You have this . . . unique perception of the world, don’t you? You think outside the box, am I right? Don’t lose that just because it hurts.”
Wey had fallen in love, right then, with herself as this strange man saw her. Her “unique perception.” As if she weren’t just a person misplaced: good at concocting fictitious spaces thanks to a lifetime spent pretending she was somewhere else. But Yon saw her as someone like him. Someone apart.
When their hour was up, he canceled the rest of his appointments and they went out to lunch. He didn’t let go of her hand during the entire meal, and they ate only what they could fork into their mouths one-handed. For three weeks, they hardly left the bare mattress of his echoing apartment on the border between Sectors III and IV, having sex what felt like non-stop and passing the gnawed mouthpiece of his cigar back and forth until they could hardly see each other through the clouds of yellow vapor. In every direction—w, x, y and z—the world fell away. She saw him wherever she looked.
The first time she invited him into her own apartment, he beamed at the oily clutter and literally fell to his knees before an unfinished painting of aspens clumped and dotted with staring black eyes under a red sunset.
“Insane. Beautiful. You should be doing this full-time. You’re wasted on windows.” She watched him move from canvas to canvas, exclaiming and flapping his hands. Was Yon, like her, eaten from within by longing for something he had never experienced? Did he ever think about the world of the past, a world turned inside-out: open space uncontained and teeming with secret lives, thousands of kilometers below Stella’s z-most decks? Had he ever tried to imagine a world beyond the human one spinning in space?
He’d kissed her flushed cheeks and whispered in her ear that if she was ready, he could take her there. They could leave Stella and go somewhere else.
It was the first time they ate tabs together, and it would turn out to be the last. A head-throbbing twenty-four hours mostly spent lying on the floor of Yon’s sparsely furnished apartment, laughing until each breath frayed into crying, crying until he convinced her she was laughing. It was the only time Wey knew Stella as a living thing, walls and floor writhing subtly together, every line and curve of the satellite embracing every other. Suddenly the world had made sense—a terror deep and icy, but exhilarating in its meaningless meaning, a snug chrysalis of unknowing, the reassuring caress of panic, everything a thousand times more than it had been. It was a journey soaked in pointless significance, it was a trip.
Wey started to have trouble making windows after that. She missed deadlines, lost a few clients. “You’re wasted on window work,” Yon said from the floor where he was kissing her ankle. “You should be painting. Making something real.” But her paintings made her feel the same way.
The sticky tide of dread that had ebbed during their first months together came seeping back. Whenever she asked Yon about the other psychedelics he used on a more or less weekly basis, he promised they’d trip again as soon as she’d “found her sea legs.” He prescribed the first of the nonsense names.
As the months passed, she came to realize she was his only regular patient. People tended to see him once and not come back.
They got along best when they were both drunk. Their first weeks together were spent drunk on the obvious error of colliding so fast. Later, they got drunk on alcohol. They’d slump against opposite walls of her tiny studio—their feet still touched—and she’d listen to him shout about everything he thought was wrong with the world. The hypocrisy of Stella’s administration, the futility of pretending the satellite’s founding ideals of equity, order, and equilibrium hadn’t been compromised from the start. With all the talk of how to combat the inevitable stratification that came with a system of free enterprise, he’d say, all notion of where people came from, their pre-Stellan origins, had completely disappeared. How unjust was it that a man like him, descended from the people who had literally built the world, couldn’t catch a break despite having tasted the static beyond reality’s crackling limit? Infatuation and alcohol turned these diatribes into soup for Wey. Until one night she heard herself shouting back that none of it mattered, that they would all die without having lived for real. He frowned and asked her what she meant. “Nothing is real,” she said again.
“How can you say that?” he asked. “We’re in love, aren’t we?”
She stopped painting and working and eating. “If you love me, you’ll get out of bed.” It became his refrain. “If you love me, you’ll take another bite.” He added another prescription. She laughed in his face, called him a hack, but took the growing piles of pills whenever she remembered. The fog had started to come down.
Had he ever actually harmed her, hit her, threatened her? Kulver wanted to know. Wey didn’t think so. But who could say what was possible? When Yon’s tab had touched her tongue—when she’d seen the truth in the clarity of the acid bath—had not Stella’s floor lurched and bucked, hurled her y-ward into sick space?
Then she’d stood in a field of swaying wheat and lied. And it had felt so natural, had come out so beautifully. It had been like stepping into a better world.