Autotomy

Xu looks up as I enter her office. Her eyes move over me in an instant of evaluation. She nods once, having concluded her diagnosis.

"You're going," she offers, saving me the trouble.

"I am."

She nods again, businesslike, and returns to her monitor.

The chessboard of her office invites stillness, reflection. Moments pass by and I try to wrap myself in the room's familiar sounds. The inescapable hum of electronic and moving air, a soft thrum masquerading as silence. The resolute tick of a clock, analogue; anachronism as rebellion. From the fountain on the table, the running of water over stones; counterpoint to the clock, a wholly different measure of time.

And always, staccato bursts of typing, effortless and efficient; a conductor at her podium. Beneath her fingers, missions dance and cavort, flights reroute, SeeDs deploy and find themselves recalled. One by one, the hooks of the system retract. My guardian angel works her magic, freeing me of classes, lectures, meetings, assignments, missions and the thousand other commitments that tie me to this place.

She asks me nothing, demands nothing. We have outgrown that conversation. The when and where of the clock yield to the relentless water. It rushes over me, carrying me along with it, finally letting me breathe.

From a thousand miles away, the phone in my hand beeps. I glance down at it and offer a few conciliatory taps in response. Xu's monitor chirps its confirmation. In the distance, she looks up at me, her form receding on the horizon.

"You're all set, King," she says, granting me my parole.

I abandon my phone to her desk. She smiles at this, our secret treason, the joy of cutting the unbreakable tether. Like a magician at work, she sweeps the phone into her hand, off the desk, into a drawer.

I whisper my thanks to her, a last gasp before surrendering to the undertow. I hear her final words, cast down from the surface. For the sake of formality, she phrases them in the plural.

"We'll be waiting."

Recrudescence

I have the train car to myself. The wheels pound out a steady rhythm in the tunnel, lulling me. In that liminal darkness beneath the world, I exist between. Neither asleep nor awake, I remember.

The hot sting of rejection; embarrassment and frustration and self-loathing closing in around me, embracing me. Worse than the rejection: his pity, his kindness and concern, as though, with the world turning to ash at my fingertips, he could mend me. His careful maneuvers, gently voicing truths I already know. Not just rejection, the numbing anesthesia of disinterest. No, rejection in favor of.

Those three words make the difference. Not anything that comes after them. She is, and I am not. Rejection of X in favor of Not-X. The variables change, but precious little else does. The predictability of the equation does nothing to blunt its edges. Every time cuts as deep as the first, because every time, I believed it wouldn't happen.

Another rejection, from years before, this one more welcome. He placed the blame on himself as he left – very gallant; the lie fooled no one. I remember a picture, the one taken of the two of us together at a party, a flickering attempt to merge our social circles. In the picture, he looks at me, and I look off-camera, laughing at the spot where Zell and Irvine stand arguing.

After eight months with him, that picture, and a toothbrush left in my room, represented the only impact he'd made on my life. He left and I barely noticed. Part of me wants to link the two together. Recent failure as punishment for past performance. I toy with that notion for a moment. It implies a fairness, a balancing of scales with the eventual hope of reward.

The scales do not exist. In their place, the serpent devours his own tail. The cycle repeats forever and always and I do not escape.

Some lessons take root at once, while some refuse to stay learned. Each time I say that I have grown, gained something for it, won't repeat the same mistakes. But the cycle encompasses that, too. Then comes the first flush, the curiosity, the excitement, the hope of a different result.

Yet here I am, driven away from my own life. The train rumbles on through its artificial night.