They Say it Snows Outside

“They say it snows outside.

They say outside is another world, a world I’ll never get to see, let alone understand.

A world I should fear. And they must be right, for how else could it be?

But you say there's plenty to see and absorb.

It must be deep, limitless. Bold. And I can't grasp it. But I trust you, when you say it exists.

They once tried to illustrate that danger. With diagrams and arrows. They made it clear, on a blackboard where the chalk cringed with each point, that I should never get out. But I barely remember. Certainly, because none of that ever convinced me. 

I found the movies you mentioned - Brat 1 and 2. Whoever that Bodrov guy was, I like him. His wool sweater, his oversized jacket, that truck he rides with the wind in his hair. Is it what it's like outside? Or was that fantasy? Like Lord of the Rings? I tried to watch it too but I fell asleep when Gandalf started to spin. It felt too far from me. That Bodrov guy and that soundtrack in his back, though, that was something.

We should go on an adventure sometime. You and me. On a truck, somewhere. Along one of those highways that seem so faraway, as I sit here typing. Everything seems faraway, as I sit here typing. Even you. Who knows? Perhaps you too are a fictional character?

I received dried beef by post last week. And I know it's you - thanks for sending it. I'm grateful for all the friends I have online, they always send me presents. Who knows what I would have become without your thoughtfulness. I don’t even know how you all found my address but it touches me.

You should come around for tea some day. We have a huge storage of quality leaves here, their label reads Mariage Frères – the Nile blend is my favorite and I’d like to share it with you. Because you are my friend. Fictitious or not.

They say it snows outside and you confirmed it with pictures. I can’t sense it. But if it were true, I’d definitely throw a snowball in your face, just for fun. It would fly and reach you before it melts, wherever you are and wherever I am. 

But I can't.

I'll therefore sit here and wait to read from you, little friend.

Write soon,

Gary.” 

**

Gary jumped off the stall of his desk and dragged his bunny slippers out of his bedroom to the kitchen.

Through the rectangular windows that stretched at the top of the grey walls, a dim light penetrated the space. You could tell that was a typical snow day, just like his Alaska friend had described in his latest letter - grey and dense. From where he was, though, Gary couldn't confirm it. He didn't even know what snow felt like. The only thing he could say was that the sun was acting shy on that morning.

He passed by the weather-generating studio and kept walking. Since his encounter with said friend, Gary cared only about natural weather. His friend sent him pictures of his surroundings and Gary pinned them in the library upstairs. As he did, he noticed natural weather changed on a whim. And those whims, he thought, could nurture him more, far more, than dry beef and Nile tea blends. If only he could embrace them.

Gary fetched a toast. It smelt of light burn. Stacey was nowhere to be found but she had set the table breakfast, as usual. He spread aloe vera jam over his toast with his finger, which he licked, and agitated his feet under the table. Stacey knew how to grow tasteful aloe vera and mull it into proper jam. She was talented, he had to admit.

Stacey was a sensitive soul with a ponytail. She walked around with thick gloves and dedicated all she had to her plants. A mandragora in need of a haircut? A root in need of a shave? She jumped in without a thought. She even spoke to them more than she spoke to him. But Gary didn't mind, for the only topic he wanted to discuss with her she avoided with a slight smile each time. She had always refused to speculate on why they had been stuck forever in that large space of flattened coal and steel that smelt of sage. Had they ever wandered through a garden to identify that scent? Of course not. But it was on the label of the stick diffusers that throned in each room of the bunker. Who had installed them? Who filled them up each day? Go figure. 

Gary threw his head backwards as he pushed strings of dry beef into his mouth and thought of his friend. His friend who taught him about American history, Alaska and Russia. Gary had, by now, collected enough pictures of snow and rusty trucks, playlists and movie recommendations from him that he could say he knew him by heart. Did that friend know anything about him? Well... Gary had played his little game again.

Gary was a storyteller. He had always been, or so Stacey said. Perhaps because she liked his tricks. Too bad people online never spotted them. One of his favourites was to pretend he received presents everyday from faraway friends when it was all bunker supplies. He also claimed scientists held him prisoner in a bunker to run experiments on his brain. "They say", "they deny", "they refute" etc. There was no such a thing as "they".

Just he, Stacey and that smell of sage. 

**

Gary climbed up to the library to orchestrate his day. Days came and went, all alike. He liked to plan his day every morning, on the sofa, nevertheless.

Arms crossed behind his neck, he cycled his legs up in the air, as if to reach the moon. The one he had painted onto the ceiling with his shaking hand years ago. Stacey had grown a plant with horizontal leaves as thick as wood and she had dared him to lay on it. He did it. And decided to paint on his back, like those Italians masters of cathedral domes. He painted constellations and galaxies. He liked to watch the Milky Way with one eye closed and the other one open, running his finger across its tentacles from afar. He did it every day. And always reached the same conclusion - his art was naïve art. Worth an exhibition, in the real world, out there.

But he was stuck in here.

Gary headed to the desk where his inventions lay in chronological order. In his minutiae solar system where planets revolved in real time. Planet Earth had already circled around the Sun five times. Based on his calculations, he was nine when he finished working on that model. So, by now, he must have been fourteen.

Yes.

And Stacey should have been in her twenties or thirties. But inside, she was most likely one hundred fifty.

He fetched his latest toy - a pink see-through piece that looked like a glue gun with a spiralling screw. Inspired from the Milky Way shape on the ceiling, naturally. He had been working on that gun for a year now and it made him proud.

Gary put on his new favourite song and pointed the gun towards origamis he had shaped three months ago. Lip-singing to Lou Reed, he pulled the trigger. The origamis shrank one after the other without a noise, without a sound.

"So it was you," a voice said in his back.

Gary turned around.

The music was so loud he hadn't noticed Stacey, in her green hat and gloves. She was holding a cactus and a watering can in her hands, her eyes darting at the gun.

Oops.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Stop that silly song.”

“It’s not silly”, Garry said nonchalantly as he pressed stop. “It’s Lou Reed.”

"You shrank the greenhouse plants. You better fix that, I'm telling you."

Stacey’s eyes did that thing. That scary thing where they turned dark all of a sudden.

What was best? To deny or confess?

To dodge. To dodge all the way.

“Ever heard of White Night? The movie? That's where that song by Lou Reed comes from. It's about a Russian dancer -"

Stacey rose her hand in the air and Gary got the message. He stopped talking.

She was looking at the wall behind him, the one where he pinned pictures from his online friends.

Her eyes wandered across the rusty trucks, the heat maps of America, Russia and Alaska. Gary had tried to tie it all together. An arrow linked the picture of a dark-haired guy with a label that read "Bodrov" to other figures. One of the pictures with a red contour read "Baryshnikov / White night". Another one, by a map of New York, "Lou Reed".

“Is that your new whim?” she asked.

"It's not a whim, it's investigation. I want to see this," he said pointing his finger at the snow pictures. "One day, I'll break out of here and I'll go there.”

Stacey laughed out loud.

“I bet you three jars of aloe vera jam that you’ll chicken out again.”

"I never chicken out!"

She shook her head. He hated when she acted as if he were her younger brother. They didn't even know what bond they had.

“Remind me what happened to your ‘escape map’ ?”

"My maps are only for understanding, never for action."

"Right, right," she said playing with the spines of her cactus. "The question is why you postpone your escape each time." 

“Never postponed a thing." Gary said looking at himself into the mirror by the desk. "I never said I wanted to leave this place."

She threw her hat and gloves on the desk and paused before answering.

“If you want to leave, we can come up with a plan. Just stop changing your mind.”

“I do whatever I want.” Gary said pointing his gun at his reflection.

“Press. I dare you.”

Silence.

"And you? You never wanted to go outside?"

She sighed.

"We've discussed this already, Gary. I have everything I need here. I have my greenhouse, I have a shelter, food. It's warm and cozy. I can play with my plants and it fulfils me to see them grow. Look at Becky, my cactus, isn't she lovely?"

Gary shrugged. He still couldn't understand how she could be satisfied with so little. There was so much to explore out there.

A brief smile animated her face, as if she had read his mind.

“You don't want to tell me why you are afraid?" she asked.

"And you? You say you care only about plants and you always avoid the topic."

The pitch of his voice escalated as he pronounced the word "topic". He could have called it any other name, it wouldn't have changed a thing. It all bit the same. It explained why he lied online. He was so insignificant that no-one cared to provide answers. Not even her, regardless of how caring and warm she seemed.

Stacey feigned not to notice the twist in his voice. She was talented, oh yes, she was.

"Show me your escape map," she said.

Gary hesitated but as her brows tilted, he opened the desk drawer.

The map represented the bunker with its two floors, ten rooms and all its corridors. Its pipes and his imaginary tunnels. In fourteen years, Gary had had the time to fantasise. But he had never been able to figure anything out. For instance, who supplied the fridge everyday? Their wardrobes? How come his clothes fit him even as he grew up and aged?

Stacey inspected the map and flipped the sheet. At its back, was another map. A "map of the world", based on what Gary had found online and what his "little friends" had taught him.

"How many maps do you need?" she asked.

The number of maps didn't matter. What mattered was the link to piece it all together. And that link he missed. It was the link between the inside and the outside. Where did he and Stacey stand in comparison to the outside world? It kept him awake at night. And that question no single map could ever answer.

“Interesting,” Stacey finally said.

She fetched a pencil and, holding it with four fingers, drew curvy lines in the pipes coming out of the greenhouse sinks. She stretched those lines towards the grey area he had drawn to delineate the outside of their bunker.

“Do you know what that is?” she asked as she counted on her hand and drew more curves.

Gary shook his head.

“Roots.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “These guys,” she hinted at her cactus, “they need water. So they find it. If you follow the roots of the plants in the greenhouse, you'll find a source of water.”

Gary frowned.

“Water means civilisation. If you follow the stream, it will take you to the closest inhabited place nearby.”

“Assuming we are on planet on Earth.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Stacey fetched the shrinking gun from his hands.

Before he could move, she targeted him and pulled the trigger. Something struck Gary in the chest and, all of a sudden, the spiralling Milky Way on the ceiling looked gigantic.

Stacey’s now giant hand reached for him and caught him by the hoodie of his jumpsuit pyjama.

Gary floundered in her fist, but she pressed tighter to immobilise him.

"Gary, I'm making you a favour."

She brought him closer to her glasses and looked at him with her soft eyes.

"You need to get out there, the world awaits. And you're well equipped, you know so much."

What did she mean 'he was equipped'? He couldn't even remember a thing from what was on his wall. He knew nothing of his friends, he had no real address, no real names. Everything was fictitious. Gary looked at her with begging eyes for she couldn't hear his mousy voice. 

“It will go fast,” she said as she strode down the stairs and through the kitchen to the greenhouse in the right aisle.

Tears surged in his eyes and he tried to punch the inside of her palm but her skin was hard and thick. His heart was beating loud. Why couldn't that day be like the others? He could create a new toy, play a prank online, lure someone into pity friendship. He could play with their feelings. Swallow their kindness. Watch more movies and dance to Lou Reed.

He bit her. But she didn't react. Worse, he heard water scream out and felt mist in his hair. As Stacey opened her fist, a wind came out of the tap water stream and shook his hair, just like Bodrov's in Brat 2, that movie his Alaska friend had recommended.

Stacey handed him one of the mandragores he had shrunk with his gun.

"You can use it to talk to me anytime," she said.

Gary broke out into tears.

"Don't cry. Remember what you've been repeating for the past month? 'They say it snows outside'." Stacey said with her soft voice. "Don't you want to see it? Gary, go. It's your chance."

As she pronounced those words, something fresh and warm filled up his chest. Gary pressed his eyes tight and squeezed the tiny mandragora in his hand.

Water poured on him as he slid into the sink holes, down the pipes. His stomach surged up and he felt something empty down there in his tummy. He giggled and raised his arms above his head.

As he slid down the giant cascade, he realised Stacey hadn’t removed his bunny slippers.