Not You

DISCLAIMER: This story contains nudity, language and slight gore that may be sensitive. Keep that in mind, and enjoy the read!

The lab smelled of chlorine, sterilization, and simplicity. A drop of water kept illuminating the background, a feeling of coldness eradicating from it as each droplet landed on the floor across the glass.

Bloop.

Miley felt comfortable behind six inches of safety glass, the space giving her time to breath and watch as the droplets of water kept splashing onto the opaque floor, the water spreading across it slowly like rain in the crevice of hills: the sound of waterboarding was similar to tranquility: so calming once apart from it, but inside the room, it would be the only solace.

Bloop.

Across the framed glass lay the dense room, as if air inside it were freakishly heavy. The tiled walls and grout between each tile was unadorned. The exception was a hole in the ceiling, directly in the axis of the room. Water, in singular tear drops, dropped from within a black hole, descending into the floor below and repeatedly bludgeoned the tile. In each cornice was a light, spewing even lighting below.

Bloop.

And inside, cowered among the pivot of the room, was a naked man who forced his hands among his temples, shaking back and forth with urgency. His legs comforted his abdomen, the fetal position matching his childish insanity. His hair was long, reaching even the droop of his shoulders. He was sweaty. The grease in his hair made it sleek and tangled, the brownish color almost shining under the glare of a light. He occasionally would look upwards, into the walls as if he could see directly through them all, and then shove his face back into his knees.

Bloop.

Miley questioned her ethics quite a few times every time she saw the man. He likely didn't even have a name, and the few times he would speak to himself his sentences were incomplete or randomized. Miley clearly studied them for meaning. There was a correlation between words, but they always seemed to be coming from mental issues. Her list was roughly a page long, and she accidentally began looking through them.

Behind you.

Why?

This time, again, again.

There.

It's not me, it's not you.

It's not.

"There! Right there!" The man suddenly yelled, and Miley jumped as his face was suddenly smashed against the glass, an eyeball tracing her every movement. Her heart slowed once more, but the shock didn't go away as fast. Her body inched towards the glass, his fattish, naked body pressed into it.

Bloop.

She was given an instruction sheet, which informed her to never speak to the man. Under no circumstance: whether he seemed to be speaking to her or past her, never could she speak to him. This forebodes her from singing, passing the time by reading aloud, and talking whatsoever. Miley thought it understandable, and speaking to this man didn't prove all that hard not to do. He seemed frantic at all times, and a conversation with him would likely revert his mental state into a downward spiral. Miley knew that.

But confinement must be an awful, crushing thing. Those walls likely closed every day on him, and she could imagine his fear as they got closer and closer to the center, inevitably coming to crush him. His mind would be making horrifying conspiracies of death, capture, and restriction. He likely didn't know any better than this room, and his existence may be a testament to his will.

A testament that he seemed to be losing.

Bloop.

She flinched before moving backwards to make even more space than the six inches of glass. She worried at times if it was enough. A savage human can do animalistic things, and no doubt was the naked man among that species.

"It's not you! It's not us. It's not, there!" He yelled, a sudden rampage as the naked man began to scream, thumping against the walls and even the glass. He pounded his fists into the stiff walls until his knuckles began to bleed, and only then he began to suck them.

Miley grimaced at the state it would take to replenish blood by drinking it. How he may taste it and savor it like honey, since he'd never eaten honey before. Or metallic, think it was a drink for special moments, as if bleeding didn't come from damage but as a gift when he did something right. There was no point system or moral code within those four corners. He continued sucking the polish from his knuckles, licking like a stray.

"Jesus Christ..." she whispered to herself, and suddenly the man removed his lips from his hands, wide-eyed and panicked. He rose to his feet, his bare skin and body facing Miley. She returned with a set of fearful eyes, as she had broken her rule. But how had he heard? Between the glass and tiled divider, she had spoken no louder than a fly.

But this man had never heard another noise than the movement of air, his voice, and a water droplet from which he drank. A fly was likely as loud as the water slamming into the floor.

Bloop.

He moved slowly, in grouped steps, towards the glass pane. Miley backed up, her back to the tiled wall behind the glass, as if the distance would make the scene any less eerie.

Bloop.

He stayed close to the glass for what felt half an hour. Minutes felt slow, labored. Miley dared not to breathe too loudly, and finally the man gave a sign of being alive. His eyes pierced hers, locking onto her pupils as if he were preparing to strike.

"It's not us." He spoke gently, his hand down at his side flickering as if he had a tick.

Miley clinched her eyes shut, assuming when she opened them he would no longer be there. His grimy body and unwashed skin, covered in pimples and nasty buildup. That hand, twitching in and out as if the bone was itching.

She hesitantly opened her eyelids, and he was back in the corner featuring his signature fetal position. He shook back and forth profusely, forcing his legs to pop out one by one as if playing a game. His heel would crack on the ground, and he'd rise it and pull it back in each time. Miley sighed in relief. Not at his odd behavior, but merely that he wasn't so close. She looked back to her clipboard, arranging the papers and finding the information sheet. It was titled DOC. INPUT 93, and below was a long, miniature font list of needed input.

On the infrastructure of the room, her set of rules, the legalities of her job. Each set she had read probably a million times, but checking again was a silent way of passing the time. She'd developed almost slight dyslexia from surveying the letters in black matte bold for too long at times.

Bloop.

The pages would sometimes come closer without her moving it, the words on them screaming for her to read deeper. But she likely didn't know what she was missing.

Her whole life, she'd dreamt of human study. Not necessarily the kind she was in now: but mental and raw study. The nature of human wasn't like animals. It wasn't even like other humans. To watch one in solitude for extensions of time had been an irreversible experience, and signing a job as a ceremonial scientist gave her joy that would have to be studied for centuries to come. The feel and rush of learning how minds work and why we think of 'why' is just incomparable to that of anything else. A brain studies itself. Miley smiled at the clipboard, her fingers running with the words.

Infrastructure Detailing, 101: 10 x 12 Ft. Rooming, White-Wash Tile, Recessed Lights ( 8x ), One-Way Glass ( 6 in. Paneling ) ( Tile In-Look), "Nipple" Pipe ( 1x ) ( Blacked ), White-Wash Grout

Miley paused as she read, a sudden moment of confusion. She minimized the wording given to her on this sheet, making sure to review the singular line. She once again cut out the sentence itself, to the fourth property of the room.

One-Way Glass ( 6 in. Paneling ) ( Tile In-Look)

She rubbed her eyes, looking through the glass screen at the naked man, and his head rose to meet hers, as he paused from his makeshift game of heel-clicking with the tile.

Bloop.

He was staring. Wide-eyed, his bloodshot eyes almost seemed hungry. His heels were purpling in bruises from striking the tile floor, and he pointed. At her, Miley thought, and her eyes began to water from fear. She put down the clipboard.

The window she was looking through was one-way. There was no possibility, even under the right circumstance, that the naked man should see her. Hear her. Or even press against the glass as if he knew that it was glass. His wild mind couldn't possibly formulate the direction he was pointing at her, and she shuddered. She needed answers. Answers only an ill mind could create.

"How the hell do you see me." Miley whimpered, slowly taking a step towards the glass. The naked man gasped loudly. Similar to a chimp in a cage he rose in joy, a smile slapping across his lips although he was crying. With slow sobs, he rose, his beer belly hanging below him and his hair plastered to his neck and double chin.

"How. The hell. Do you see me?" Miley asked again, her voice wavering in confidence and increasing in confusion.

"Behind you." The man spoke in an usher, his finger raising again towards Miley. She shook her head, turning behind her to nothing but the tiled wall. She turned back around, looking at the man who, on his end, was staring into a tiled wall. He kept pointing, and out of wonder, Miley moved to the left. His finger did not move with her, and Miley moved towards him as he clearly didn't see her moving.

He wasn't pointing at her. Just speaking.

"There! There!" He screamed again, his smile dropping almost instantaneously in a bipolar fashion. He continued sobbing, but this time he raised a hand to his head, yanking the patch of hair by the tips until it was awkwardly peeling from his skull. His scalp was red and bubbling, the red flesh making a distorted oval on his crown.

Miley began to whimper at the sight, and he threw the fallible skin and puff of hair at the glass pane. She stood at the center of the room, her breath shaking as she reached for something to lean on, but to no avail as her hands swiped at the air. The room was bare.

"What are you talking about?" Miley tried to not choke on her words, the palms of her hands beginning to sweat under the laboring weight of nothingness. She wiped them on her shirt.

"It's not you. It's not you. It's not us." He spoke again, still ripping more at the remaining follicles off his head, a gruesome squealing as it ripped off the scalp. "Right there!" His hand didn't move from where he pointed, and Miley kept looking back and forth, awaiting her answer and for the trauma to stop.

Bloop.

She looked behind her, thinking of what she had seen on the information sheet.

One-Way Glass ( 6 in. Paneling ) ( Tile In-Look).

Her fingers began to shake as if mending with the left hand of the naked man. She followed his disheveled finger towards the back wall. Her hands trembled as she approached, and she stepped slowly in the direction of a presumably false truth.

Within a yard of the wall, with outwardly perfect tile and colored space in-between. Miley feared it was a hoax. Her hands rose to the plus-shaped space, near a singular tile, the sensation on her fingertips racing in anticipation. She felt adrenaline begin to fasten her heart, and took a moment to look back at the naked man. He had ripped out more hair, only the left side of his head still enveloped in greasy fleece.

His nail at the tip of his finger was overgrown, crooked and still pointing to the empty space Miley once stood. He sobbed and sobbed, his tears melting into his mouth although he didn't close it. His nose was filled with snot, and Miley inhaled deeply before turning back to the wall.

She rushed the action, knocking on the wall. She half expected it to be dense, as tile should, and that the naked man was a lunatic who had officially lost his mind. But it was sharp, distinct. The material reverberated at her touch. it didn't crack her knuckles as tile would, nor give her plentiful red honey to absorb from the ends of them. The wall, just like the tile the man had seen, wasn't tile.

It was glass.

Miley stepped back, so far she hit the one-way glass on the other end, and the thump of her back set the man abroad. He freaked out at the foreign noise, screaming as he jumped, even sprinting from end to end of the room, his body flailing against the parallel walls. He hit them with his shoulders, hips, and flapping stomach of lard.

She felt her throat close in horrid realization, and she stared into that tile wall as if she knew someone were behind it. The glass seemed so apparent now, as if it had always been there. The man behind her continued crashing the room, the noise overwhelming her senses but silent compared to the reverberating glass.

It never was her. The man, in his naked and vulnerable state, was undeniably insane. But he knew: he knew every word he spoke, every neuron he stretched to explain that just as behind his wall, there was one behind hers. It's not us, she thought. Not patient nor professor. She isn't studying human behavior, but being studied as she studied another.

Two brains studying themselves.

She looked at her room, and realized just how isolated she was. Confinement was an awful, crushing thing. Her mind tricked her into believing the walls were closing and she heaved herself to the floor in a corner, shaking back and forth, the fear of being alone infecting her human quality.

The one-way glass on two sides of the room, the true white wash tile on the others. Her lone clipboard at the end of the room with an assortment of drifting paper, lights adjourning the tops and illuminating the voided floor below. A lone woman: a lone man, inside a room with nothing but a mind.

Naked man suddenly stopped causing a ruckus. The silence became a friend, and Miley was left once again with her thoughts. She dared not look up to see where he had gone or if he had relapsed to his fetal position, but instead a mechanical whir caught her attention near the ceiling. Her glossy optics slowly scanned upwards, a black hole forming in the very center of the room far above. From it, as slow as her mind processed it, was a singular drop of water, beginning a whirlpool at the bottom of that tile.

Bloop.