Ouroboros
Arsh Kader wakes up in a cold sweat. Someone is in his room.
Content Warning: Suicidal ideation
It wasn’t the first time Arsh woke up in the middle of the night, sweat through his sheets, to the sense that someone was standing in the corner, watching him. It was, however, the first time he was right.
The sight of the stranger in the yellow lamplight was like an ice bath, paralysis climbing down his spine like a stepladder. She was leaning on the wall beneath his Blade Runner poster, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the color. She looked about forty, maybe fifty if the extra decade had been kind to her. Her black hair was falling on the shoulders of a blacker denim jacket, in all ways ordinary except that, instead of buttons or a zipper, each of the edges was lined with a metallic strip of a texture Arsh had never seen, like the spine of a robotic fish. There was a square-shaped device with a pulsing blue ring clipped to her belt like a pager. She was so casually still, a predator at ease, disassembling him with her gaze.
The only sounds were the low groan of the expanding radiator and his mother’s voice in his head. If someone breaks into the house, just let them take what they want. Your life is the most important thing.
“What do you want?” he croaked. It felt like shouting.
“Huh.” The woman tilted her head, as though rotating one of his components in her mind. When she spoke, there was a kind of buzz at the bottom of her voice. “You sound different from how I remember.”
“What,” he tried again, injecting a hint of threat this time, “do you want?”
“Relax.” She made a fence of her hand between them. “I’m not going to hurt you. The opposite, actually.”
He reached for his phone on the nightstand, trying to move as slowly as possible. “Is that why you broke into my room to watch me sleep?”
She laughed, and he knew he’d heard that laugh before: it rolled and peaked like the waves of the bay, stabbing and tossing the ferry back home. “I didn’t mean to watch you sleep. You just looked so peaceful. It was probably a nightmare, though, wasn’t it?”
His hand grasped at the empty wood where his phone should be. He tried to keep his eyes from it. If he could just find it without her noticing, he could … well, he could do something. Had he put it on the other side of the lamp?
“Looking for this?” she sighed, waving his phone at him by the corner, like a poker player about to reveal a flush. Shit.
“Give it back to me,” he said. The threat was not a hint anymore, though he didn’t quite know what he was threatening. He was disgusted at the sound, at the posturing as the kind of man who was capable of violence, at the way the two ideas were so inseparable.
“You’re going to have to hear me out first.” She slipped one hand down to the doorknob and, almost absently, twisted the privacy lock upright with a click. “My name is Laila. I’m, uhh ...” she paused, doing some opaque calculus in her head, “I’m from the future.”
“Sure,” said Arsh.
“It’s true.” Laila smirked, and the confidence of it forced him to kick down the sense that it might be. She looked at the floor, then back up to meet his eyes. “And you’re a younger version of me.”
A slideshow of images clicked over in rapid succession, all the mosquito-like thoughts he normally swatted away burrowing into his skin, running amok in his blood. A dull hurt without a name threatened to spill out of his stomach like bile. He began twitching his toes, because at least that she wouldn’t be able to see. “Get out of my fucking room,” he said.
Laila exhaled through her nose, as if to say, you’re really going to make me do this? “Your name is Arshad Yazeed Kader. You were born on January 18th, 2004. Your passcode is 5522. Your parents are Fadia and Rasul. They have a really old Boston Terrier you named K-Mart when you were six. You spend so long in the bathroom people think you have a digestive problem, which you let them believe because it’s easier than explaining that sometimes you lie on the floor unable to get up. When you jerk off, you imagine red-haired women dressing you up in skirts and fucking you with a strap-on.”
“I don’t—”
“When you were 15 you stayed with your friend Isaiah and his parents for the weekend while yours went to a funeral. You woke up early and saw a family of rabbits on the grass outside the kitchen window. That night, when you lit the fire pit to make s’mores, you heard a squeaking sound. Isaiah’s dad said it was just the wood, and you’d never heard wood make a sound like that before, but you didn’t say anything. You only figured out what was happening when you spotted the adult rabbit inside the pit. You and Isaiah saved that one, but her three children burned to death. Isaiah’s dad laughed at how hard you fought to save that rabbit. You haven’t eaten Hershey’s since then, because the taste makes you nauseous.”
Arsh tried to say something, anything, but each sentence found its target precisely in his memory, and he came up empty.
“And once, when you were taking out the trash, a piece of broken glass ripped the garbage bag and sliced open your arm. It’s the only real scar you have.” Laila extended her arm and, pulling back her sleeve, revealed an identical question mark-shaped line on the inside of her elbow. “You thought the nurse at the urgent care, the one with the curly hair and the husky voice, was so beautiful you tried to cut your hand with a kitchen knife just to see her again. But it didn’t go deep enough the first time, and the second time you chickened out.” She rested back on the poster again, the thick paper creasing under her head. “You thought you just wanted to fuck her. I didn’t figure it out for a long time, but you thought that because it was the best filter you had for what you really felt: you wanted to be her. Or look like her, anyway.” She glanced up and down her own form. “You sort of pull it off, too.”
The onslaught of perfect truths, so many things he hadn’t told a living soul, crashed over his head like a waterfall. A collection of disconnected moments pulled into parallax around an impossible point. When he wrestled back control of his larynx, the only question he could ask was the only one she had already answered. “How do you know all this?”
“I told you,” she said, “you’re me.”
And, suddenly, with the floor tilting sideways like a cabin on a ship, he saw it. In the rounded cuff of her eyebrows. In the way her ears were flat against the sides of her head. In the two tiny brown birthmarks on her neck, imperceptible to anyone else, yet now obviously the same he glanced over every morning when he applied his sunscreen. In the differences too: the subtle flares of her face and nose, the curves in her hips and chest, the texture of her hair. All foreign, all primordially familiar.
She was watching him stare. “Don’t tell me you’re that surprised.”
He wasn’t, really. She made blinding, hypnotic sense, like staring directly into the sun; he could already see the purple afterimage of her lingering in his vision for days. It was like he had been trying to jam a triangular peg into a round hole his entire life, and for the first time, tried the one to the left and found the wood sliding right home. All the fuzzy threads of the possible future knitted together into a single, graceful knot. It was the way he imagined all those other kids felt in second grade when adults asked them ‘and what do you want to be when you grow up?’ A football player! An astronaut! A princess!
A woman. The word was so deliciously forbidden to him, just the shape of it made his stomach loop around like it was being sucked through a crazy straw.
Laila slipped her hand into the back pocket of her jeans. It surfaced cradling something resembling his smartwatch charger, two circular nodes bound together by a rubber-coated wire. She walked over and lowered herself into his desk chair, holding it up to the lamp for him to see.
“This is an RBRS Device. All we have to do is attach one side to you and one side to me.” She pointed to the back of her head to demonstrate. “This will allow me to ...” she paused, perusing the selection of phrases, “take over from here.”
“Take over...” he rolled the words around in his mouth, tasting them from different angles.
“Take over,” she repeated, “It’s obvious you want to be me. I know how to make that happen. You can live the life you’ve always wanted.”
“And is that part of it?” Arsh said, reaching towards the square on her belt. Laila flinched away, like he had just aimed a loaded rifle at her stomach.
“Listen,” she said, rotating the desk chair to angle the square away from him. “I know how this goes. It takes you years to figure it out, years after that to do anything. Years of loneliness and dissociation. Years of stumbling around without real feelings. You have a way out of that.” She holds up the two pads of the device. “It only takes a minute.”
It wasn’t like he hadn’t dreamed of an opportunity like this. He was never stupid enough to believe that taking his life was actually the easy way out. It was a dirty little trick, really: from his absentee roommate, who would find his body only once it started to smell, to his parents and grandparents, who would find a bottomless pit of grief. Everyone who wouldn’t be able to imagine why a bright young man with his whole future ahead of him had failed to see that his life was worth living. Everyone who would wonder whether they could have saved him if they had only reached out a little more often, to take his decision as a myopic excuse to flagellate themselves. The existential joke that his twenty-one years orbiting the sun would amount to a collection of grayscaled headshots posted to his acquaintances’ social media, the interchangeable backdrop to a platitude and the phone number for the national suicide hotline.
What Laila offered was so much simpler, in comparison. He’d just let go, sink into the black waters of his consciousness, and not only would nobody ever know, but those who didn’t reject the woman she’d make him into would rejoice that the person they loved was finally happy. It was perfect; all he had to do was nothing.
But, faced with that choice, Arsh was still an ape. An ape with consciousness, that knew he had consciousness, and, when the choice was in front of him, would fight with tooth and claw to retain it. So when Laila leaned in, with one hand gently on his forehead, the other reaching for the back of his skull, he slapped her arm away.
“No,” he said, “I can’t.” Then, because that didn’t feel like enough: “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.” Without breaking eye contact, she reached into the inside pocket of her jacket. “Hold still.”
He watched Laila aim something at him, finger hovering over what must have been a trigger, and the adrenaline that had been crouching in his bloodstream awoke almost a second too late. He grabbed her wrist and wrenched it, a misty beam of white light arcing over his shoulder and dissipating into a fevered glow against the wall. Laila swore, and he shoved her backwards before she could get her guard up. He made for the door, unlocking it and slamming it closed behind him, stumbling backwards into the kitchen. Running through possibilities at the speed of panic, he grabbed two legs of a kitchen stool and lofted it onto his shoulder, hiding behind the refrigerator.
The door creaked open.
“What are you so scared of, Arsh?” Laila called into the dark, “I know you. I know you’re—”
Arsh pounced, shouting a warrior’s cry to pump his nerves. He swung the stool at Laila’s torso, but it hit the counter instead. Two hours of hunching over IKEA instructions with an allen wrench exploded in his hands, the blond splinters scattering across the floor. Laila aimed at him again, but he charged her at full speed before she could set it off, the light sparking off the ceiling. He pinned her backwards against the stove, the weapon pointed at the wall next to the sink. She tried to shove and wriggle free, but she was older, more fragile than he was. Her shoulder bumped the glass cover of a saucepan on the drying rack, which fell backwards and flipped the garbage disposal switch. It began gargling, loud and hungry.
Laila snarled. “Why are you fighting me? I’m trying to help you.”
“Because I’m alive!” he shouted, incredulous, “I’m a person!”
She laughed, and he recognized it now: it was his mother’s laugh. “You’re not a person,” she spat, her words laced with arsenic, “You’re a shell! You’re just wasting day after pointless day, pissing your life, my life, into the gutter because you’re too scared to do what you really want!” She kneed him in the crotch and slipped free of his hold. He grabbed at her through the pain, trying to find purchase on her waist, but she escaped to the far counter, raising the stun gun again. “You won’t even notice it’s happening.” She moved to pull the trigger. And then, she hesitated.
Arsh was holding the square from her belt an inch above the disposal. It continued its growl, salivating for matter to shred with its spinning razor teeth. The device pulsed an indifferent blue between his fingers. It was smooth and cold, like ceramic. “This is important, isn’t it?”
"Okay.” She continued lowering her aim with one hand, coaxing him down with the other. “Just please … don’t drop it. We can—”
He smiled and, in a fit of toddlerish spite, let it fall into the drain, disappearing beneath the shiny black rubber. He could hear it bouncing from blade to blade, the mechanical confusion of one machine trying to digest another.
Laila screamed and tackled Arsh to the ground. There was a white flash from behind her head as his skull collided with the floor. Then, the world went black.
Arsh awoke to every fire alarm in the apartment shrieking at him in discordant symphony. Black smoke filled the top half of the room, lit from below by fire eating the countertop. He coughed and spat as he got to his knees, saliva mixing with blood on the tile. The sink was gone, shattered from the inside, shards of it strewn across the floor. His eyes, and a hundred other places on his body, were stinging and raw.
He found Laila next to his arm, unconscious. He laid a finger on her throat, searching for a pulse; it was there, regular and true as his own, but blood was leaking out of a cut on her neck, with siblings down her back and side. Arsh pulled her over his shoulder, almost buckling under the extra weight, and began crawling towards the front door. He tried to unlock it, but the brass already too hot to touch. He bit through the pain and twisted it as hard as he could, then the handle, then dragging their bodies into the cold, forcing the door shut behind him.
The February night wasted no time stripping Arsh of whatever heat the fire had lent him. The sidewalk scratched through his sleeping shorts, biting with icy teeth into his calves. He lifted Laila’s torso onto his thighs to shield her from it, examining the shape of the body that could one day be his. When he traced his finger over her jaw, he found that it was fizzing, like soda poured into a glass. In the distance was the angry red whine of a fire engine, glancing off the buildings’ walls, then manifesting into physical form as it turned the corner and squealed to a hissing stop. The firefighters’ boots touched down to earth; they grabbed their equipment from the side of the truck, attached hose to hydrant, located the flames. Arsh’s upstairs neighbors tripped out of their front door, coughing the clear air into their lungs.
Arsh’s eyes fell back to his lap, but Laila was gone. The memory of her smeared in his mind, blurring into a morass of disconnected impressions. He couldn’t make sense of them anymore, and when he gave up trying, his mind went as blank as the piles of snow lining the street. All he could hear now was the purr of the idling diesel engine.
One of the men clapped a giant, gloved hand onto Arsh’s shoulder, trying to shake him back into the present. “What’s your name, son?”
He gave his response to the concrete, the words seeping out of him like the thin smoke from his windows: “I don’t know.”
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