Leftovers

The hum. That was the first thing Owen Lux always noticed. Fable's Edge didn't breathe; it vibrated. A low thrum, deep in the bones, seeping through concrete and glass like damp. Daytime brought the usual racket -- traffic, commerce, ambition grinding itself down on the pavement. But night? Night was a steadier drone. Server farms sighing, ancient HVAC units wheezing, and beneath it all, the white noise of millions lying awake, staring at their ceilings. Owen lived right in the middle of that static. Or felt like he did.

His apartment was third floor, overlooking an alley frequented by stray cats moving like small, grey ghosts. Philosophers, perhaps. Or just hungry. Inside wasn't much: one main room pulling triple duty as office, living room, and existential waiting area. A tiny kitchen always smelled faintly of old coffee, and the bathroom faucet dripped. Drip. Drip. Keeping time with the city's insomnia. Owen figured he was thirty-one, give or take. The exact number felt less important than the sheer weight of the years piling up.

Transcription. That was the gig. Strange alchemy sometimes, turning spoken waffle into neat rows of text. Corporate earnings calls (dull), legal depositions (duller), academic lectures that made the brain ache. Headphones practically fused to his skull, fingers dancing on the keyboard, he wasn't really living in the city, more processing its background noise. It paid the bills, most months. Just. But it cost him sleep, piece by painstaking piece.

And the fatigue... it wasn't just being tired. It felt like a presence in the room, a heavy, damp coat that he couldn't take off. It bled the colour out of things, muffled sounds. Thinking felt like wading through mud. Coffee helped, sure, but it was like poking a dying fire -- a quick flare, then colder ash. He measured time in blinking cursors and the electric bill.

Cal shared the apartment, theoretically. Graveyard shift at Fable's Edge General, wrestling chaos and the smell of bleach. Their schedules were ships passing in the night, their main communication via sticky notes on the fridge: Need coffee filters. Rent due Friday. Something smells weird in hall -- your turn. Owen would be crawling towards dawn just as Cal stumbled in, trailing that hospital smell and a weariness bolted onto his bones. You could almost see it.

The weirdness started on a Tuesday. Or maybe Thursday? Days had gone blurry. Deadline hell: eight hours of some tech merger, all acronyms and corporate backstabbing, due 9 AM sharp. By four in the morning, the screen swam. His eyelids felt weighted with lead. He slumped forward, forehead hitting the cool, cheap desk. The city's hum permeated the particleboard. Cal had crashed on the futon maybe an hour before, still in his scrubs, instantly gone.

Clarity. Just five minutes of it. Please. Owen pushed himself up, aiming for the kitchen, another doomed coffee mission. Shuffling past the futon, his hand brushed Cal's bare forearm.

It wasn't a shock, not electricity. It was... emptiness? A cool, smooth sensation flowed up his arm, like stepping out of scorching sun into deep shade. The pressure in his head didn't vanish, but it lifted. Suddenly, the fuzzy edges sharpened. Everything snapped into focus. He felt calm, too. Strangely calm and detached. He snatched his hand back as if burned, though the sensation had been cool. He stood there, heart hammering lightly. The refrigerator hum suddenly seemed deafeningly loud. What was that? It felt impossible, unreal.

He finished the transcription, flying through it, words lining up cleanly. Uploaded 8:52 AM. Felt... hollowed out. Functional, but hollow. Then noon hit. The crash wasn't just tiredness; it felt geological, like being buried under layers of rock and silt. And mixed in? Fragments. Shards that weren't his. The beep... beep... beep of a machine. Iodine, sharp and sterile. The cool gleam of light on linoleum. For a split second, the phantom stretch of latex gloves over his hands. He slept fourteen hours straight after that -- a deep, dreamless sleep unlike his usual tossing.

Next morning, Cal made coffee, looking unnaturally perky. "Weirdest damn thing," Cal yawned, stretching till his back cracked. "Slept like crap, maybe five hours tops. But I woke up feeling amazing. Wired. Could run a marathon." He squinted at Owen. "You, though? You look like hell, man."

Owen mumbled something, unable to shake the ghost-smell of iodine. Outside, the city hummed along. He felt, distinctly, like it was watching him.

He started experimenting, carefully. He had to, didn't he? Bills weren't paying themselves. A deliberate brush against someone nodding off on the late-night train yielded that little lift, that focus. Hours later, though: payback. A throbbing ache behind the eyes, the phantom taste of stale beer clinging to his throat. He tried a handshake with a stressed-looking bookstore clerk, held it maybe a second too long. Clarity arrived, yes, but later came a wave of anxiety about misplaced inventory, the dusty smell of old paper clinging to him. It worked. Required contact, required intent -- a silent ask. Skimmed the exhaustion right off them. But the bill always came due. His own fatigue returned heavier, laced with sensory take-home, mental footnotes from strangers.

Rent wasn't just looming; it was kicking down the door. Transcription work felt thinner, the algorithms creeping in. He saw the exhaustion everywhere: faces lit by phone screens, bodies slumped on buses, the strained pitch in voices ordering coffee. Everyone paddling hard in the murky city pool. And he had this weird, leaky paddle.

He put the word out. Coded messages, buried deep online. Burnout forums, city survival guides. "Fable's Edge Fade got you down? Short-term balance adjustment available. Consult O. Lux. Total discretion." Vaguely mystical or perhaps just desperate.

First paying customer: Anya. Grad student, dissertation eating her alive. Met her by a grimy fountain pigeons used as a toilet. She looked like him -- pale, dark circles, vibrating with caffeine jitters. He kept it vague. "It's a kind of transfer. Temporary." Skepticism warred with desperation in her eyes. He had her put her hand flat on the bench; he covered it with his. Focused. Pulled.

That cool flow again, tasting of library dust and deadline panic. He felt the ache of hours hunched over books. Anya blinked hard. "Whoa. Is it... I feel... lighter?"

He pulled his hand back fast. "Temporary," he warned again. "Pace yourself." She pressed crumpled bills into his hand. They felt strangely weightless. That night, the fatigue returned with a vengeance, heavy with footnotes he hadn't written and a sudden, intense opinion about Habermas he definitely didn't hold before.

Word got around. Whispers. Owen became a rumor among the sleep-deprived. 'The Sleep Man.' 'The Balancer.' He fell into a routine: finding neutral ground -- generic cafes, park benches, library corners. Quick contact, quick cash. Always the warning: "Temporary. And you might get... echoes."

He grew better at it, sipping, not gulping, controlling the flow. But it didn't stop it from piling up. His head, once relatively quiet, began to feel like a cluttered attic. Typing marketing drivel, he'd suddenly crave pickled herring (Mr. Henderson, Accounts Payable, Tuesday borrow). He woke from dreams that were weird collages: arguing Spanish verb conjugations with his long-dead grandmother; searching frantically for a lost cat he'd never owned.

His own past felt foggy, unreliable, like a dream fading in morning light. What did his childhood bedroom smell like? He couldn't pin it down. But he could recall, vividly, the itchy wool of a security guard's uniform from last week. His sense of self wasn't solid anymore. Permeable. Like cheap fabric soaking up spills.

He bought a used turntable, hiding in old jazz records. Miles Davis, cutting through the mental fog. Bill Evans, piano like falling water. Coltrane, reaching for something beyond the grime. Sitting there, twilight bleeding through the window, the city humming its tune, phantom feelings flickered past: a twinge in a left knee (waitress, maybe), the bitter aftertaste of instant coffee (student, perpetually broke), a baffling wave of affection for golden retrievers (God knows who). The music helped. Something solid to hold onto.

Oddly, it was useful sometimes. Borrowing from a coder tangled in bugs clarified an impossible sentence in a legal doc. Borrowing from a baker stressed about yeast led him to steep tea for the perfect time without thinking. Not learned knowledge but borrowed reflexes. Creepy. Unearned.

He tried quitting once. A whole week of no borrows, just staying inside. Water, plain food, the drip-drip-drip, the jazz. It was worse. Without the borrowed static buffer, he didn't get clearer; he felt raw and exposed. The city's baseline exhaustion, the massive collective sigh he'd unknowingly insulated himself from, flooded in. Overwhelming. He felt thin, insubstantial. The borrowed fatigue, fragments and all, had become insulation. Going back felt like relief feeling like defeat.

Later, Owen saw Anya sometimes, across crowded cafes. She looked... better? Less frantic. Still tired, though. That Fable's Edge stamp. They'd nod. Shared secret. Owen wondered if her thoughts on Foucault still bounced around his head. Probably.

Soon, the heatwave hit, clamping down hard, making the city feel close and mean. The hum pitched higher. Nerves frayed. Demand spiked. He ran ragged, back-to-back meetings in stifling cafes, on park benches shimmering in the heat. Borrows got quicker, sloppier. The residues blurred into a psychic soup.

One late afternoon, crossing Fable's Edge Plaza. Concrete radiating heat. Air thick with fumes. Just finished with a paralegal -- her fatigue sharp, anxious, tasting faintly of metal filings. Heading for the subway, feeling that secondary weight settle, laced with legalese. And then... it happened.

It wasn't a collapse, nor a grand revelation. More like... things clicked. Or quietly came apart and reassembled. The sensory ghosts didn't just flicker; they surged. All at once. A badly edited film montage: Chlorine (lifeguard, yesterday). Rough canvas (artist, last week). The specific dull ache of typing (office drone, this morning). Cloying air freshener (too many taxis). A child's fury over dropped ice cream. An old woman's quiet pride in her roses. Hundreds of tiny, mundane, human moments.

He expected to shatter, but instead, a weird calm settled. Deep and heavy. He stopped fighting it, stopped trying to untangle his threads from theirs. The lines were gone. Erased. He was this pile, this living junk drawer of Fable's Edge cast-off tiredness. Standing stock-still, heat baking the pavement, the city buzzing intensely, he didn't feel broken. He felt... strangely whole. A composite. He took a breath. Tasted asphalt, exhaust, and maybe a fleeting hint of salty sea air -- a memory borrowed from a coast he'd never seen. He started walking again.

Time slid by; a season, a year? Fable's Edge cycled through grey and grime. Owen remained. The cats haunted the alley. The faucet dripped. He still transcribed, fingers flying now, an uncanny knack for jargon, for accents absorbed second-hand.

Owen still borrowed sleep, but differently. Tuning an old radio. Less frantic taking, more managing the static. He felt the flavors of exhaustion: brittle burnout, heavy physical drag, the thin paper of loneliness. He chose carefully, keeping the internal ecosystem humming.

People began to find him quiet, perceptive. A little unnerving. Small observations hit close to home. Let them think he was a good listener. Only he knew he wasn't just listening; he resonated.

Owen's mind remained a busy intersection. Making tea might bring the phantom feel of worn denim (bike messenger, last month). Afternoon light could trigger borrowed satisfaction from a specific park bench he'd never visited. His original self? The basement foundation. Still there, probably. Buried deep. Was there a pang of loss for that simpler, singular existence? Sometimes, faintly. But it was too distant now, like remembering a name he used to know.

Loneliness was intrinsic to being this connected to the city's pulse, feeling its collective ache, yet fundamentally alone within the sheer strangeness of it. Not peace. Equilibrium. A strange balancing act.

One evening, listening to Coltrane stretch towards the impossible, he watched a ginger cat meticulously groom itself on the fire escape. The city's endless, insomniac drone filled the air. A familiar throb started behind his left eye. Not his. Felt like... dust motes in sunlight, the smell of old wood. Carpenter? Months ago. A sudden, sharp pang arrived -- not for his old self, but just for quiet. Five minutes of pure silence inside his own skull. Owen closed his eyes. Felt its weight. The echoes. All of it. He was Owen Lux, yes. The name a label on it now, holding the city's tired dreams. The vibration persisted. Inside and out. He held it. He endured. That was the gig now.

Some months after his encounter with Anya, the grad student, he sees her across a bustling cafe. She looks rested, focused, but as she turns to talk to a friend, Owen sees her idly tap her pen against her notebook in a specific, nervous rhythm -- his old rhythm, the one he used when stuck on a difficult transcription phrase. Then, she briefly scratches behind her left ear, another unconscious habit Owen shed months ago as other echoes crowded it out. A cold dread washes over him. He hasn't just been taking from others—he's been leaving fragments of himself, or the collective he carries, imprinted onto those he touches. He's not merely a container, but a vector, his own leftovers subtly altering others in his wake.