Player 2

The ecstatic feeling and the rush of energy coming from carefully patterned sound notes blaring in your ears is something of an acquired taste. A far better remedy to let off the day’s strain than listening to singing bowls and people whispering in your ears.

 I like to pretend I’m doing something and being busy while I’m listening to songs. So I write and keep scribbling in my fancy diary, what I call my “brain trash”. It’s hard to be organized with the notebooks and have them used for one specific reason when you’re a notebook hoarder. 

So I scribble. 

And then I hear it. A knock on the door. 

Right, I’m the most interesting person in the whole world when I’m trying to let off steam and plugged to my earphones. 

I’m way too comfortable in the way I’m seated in my bed guarded by my blanket fort to make effort to move all the way to the doo, so I yell out a response. 

Sometimes, the parents’ ego can be off the charts. They’d like for you to be present in front of them just so they could convey something they could have just yelled back from wherever they are. But whoever the intruder, they are right in front of my room, and the door is not even locked. 

But I was in no mood, to begin with trying to be the good child anyway so I resume my songs. 

Another knock on the door, this time louder. I couldn’t hear it but I could guess by the door rattling against the frame. 

I hurl the blankets away from me and rip the earphones off my ears just so I could go share some of the pleasantness to whoever desperate enough to keep knocking. 

In one violent swing, I open the door to a gaping empty corridor. I am even angrier now. This is no time to play pranks. 

It was odd because the gap between my bed and the door is short and given the wide, angry strides I just took I should be able to have caught if anyone in this household was trying a knock and run prank on me. 

The staircase was well empty and I definitely didn’t hear rushed footsteps. 

I shut the door a little too violently and stomped back to my cloud of a bed, fixing the pair of earphones back. 

This time, I lowered the sound just a little bit. Just in case. 

If it annoyed me the last two times, it was nothing short of a rage I’m having as the door rattles with a knock for the third time. 

I’m going to bring down that door if I’m only ever going to get privacy on a virtual level. 

But as I take a step toward the door, someone else had done what I was going to do. The door crashed into an explosion, the wooden slate disintegrated into tiny shards. I put up my hands as the pieces come flying directly at me. My eyes both shut tightly.  

The corridor has gone, leaving only a void with blazing light. 

My eyes would have been scorched from its blinding brightness if they had been open. 

My body is shaking so violently from the shift in the air and the wave of the explosion. I can feel my hair flying like a flag away from my face. 

Someone is shaking me. 

“Wake up, damn it!” a rough voice I’ve never heard before yells at me from a distance. 

I can’t see where the voice was coming from. 

Something hit my face with a painful whack that made my vision go pitch black, and suddenly I could open my eyes. 

The vision was not of my room, no. This is a different place and I feel vivisected, especially in my stomach. Or it could be something like hunger. 

I blink too many times, my eyes are too dry and begging me to stop tearing the tissues behind the lids. 

But what my dry eyes caught were something of a shock sending a wave of fear down my spine. I could feel my eyes growing bigger. 

A man. 

The voice had belonged to him. 

My throat is too dry to cough up a question, but what I meant to ask him was kind of cliche, anyways. 

“Finally . . .” he sighed and sat back from floating above my face. 

My muscles normally work fine, just not when I need to get away from kidnappers, especially ones that try to blow me up. 

Also, what did he do to my family? Were they also brought here? 

As I run these questions, there is an ambiguity in the thoughts that I can’t seem to figure out. 

“Hello, Player 2.” he smiled exhaustedly like he had been running for a very long time. He scoffed before continuing, “you probably think you’re Player 1.” He shook his head from his right shoulder to the left like he’s trying to acquiesce a fact he doesn’t believe “vice versa.” 

I could ask this man some questions, but I’d rather stay and gather more of his information. I mean, he talks a lot. 

“You were asleep.” he lowered his voice, sounding almost disappointed, “I think you were going for something of a longer sleep than usual.” 

He looked around the room. It’s a room, definitely. And I am shackled to a tube hanging from my elbow pit. 

A picture memory of a long, bony pair of hands working on fixing this tube to my arm flashed before me, causing me to jerk it away. 

I tried to . . . sleep? 

I looked around the room. I was sitting on a thin and worn mattress set on the floor. The room is quite empty, with nothing but a shelf full of old boxes. 

I blink once, and something like sense seems to have returned. I know this place. 

“So how long have you been out here?” he asks while looking into the boxes. “I mean you have way more stuff than I do. That explains why you were not out there.” 

Out there? I tried to mouth the words as if doing so would help me make more sense of what he is saying.

“Where are my family?” I blurted, shocked I had braved myself to ask him something, and at the rasp of my own voice. 

He turned around very slowly. His eyes are a bit too wide and shocked for a simple question.  

“What family?” his eyebrows bunched with curiosity. 

“My family. When you took me from home.” Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe. That he kidnapped me.

“Darling, no one took you from anywhere. I only just met you.” He studied me even intensely and rushed toward where I was sitting, “tell me, are there more?” 

“What?” What was I supposed to remember?  

“Earth,” he made a grand pause giving me one last chance to understand reality, “was wiped off to its last drop.” 

I processed each and every word over and over, but all I can manage to do is stare at him hoping to fix this riddle. 

“For five years, I thought I was the only human. Only living thing.” he waited “until I met you.” “And you’re saying you don’t remember anything?” 

An image rose slowly in front of my eyes, slowed down so I could take my time remembering the moment bright and clear.

A bright explosion. 

It was a wave no one anticipated. 

It was not slow nor was it quick. It ended before anyone knew how they died. 

And I had been only fifteen when it happened. 

I had been alone ever since. There aren’t ways I have not tried in these years to survive after the hoarding was out of options. When the plants and animals have been wiped off the surface too.

There were times I had sought to cook my own parts when I rolled on the floor crying in starvation. Only vast planes of a dead planet. 

I’ve gone months without getting any food. I look at my arms, or the little skin left clinging to the corroding bones. 

I tried to quit, and I got woken up by this man. 

Another person. 

The day the Ending happened, I had been lying in the makeshift basement room. My parents had tried to knock on my door, but I was too late. I did not hear them with the earphones plugged on. 

I have stopped myself from wondering why I hadn’t been one of them. The ones who were wiped away into dust. 

Surviving does a great job refraining me from drowning in regret and remorse. 

I didn’t realize that I was picturing my memories by staring into his eyes. But his pair of glistening eyes were only mirrors of my own pair. I gasped with the reality crashing in on me? The walls of the room, what’s left of my basement room crashed in on me.  

I kept mouthing random things. I am laughing and then howling in despair after having brought back to the reality I tried very much to escape, but the person before me is a survivor who had gone on thinking he was the only person to be alive. 

The planet is not dead, it has only changed. Although there is still nothing to feed on not all hope is lost. 

I am no longer alone. And there is no point in thriving the old ways, so we shall start anew.