The Indicator x The Student: “Five by Five”

I trace my wires like they are scars. They sprawl across my torso in silver ivy, tethering hands to hips, shoulders to knees, lungs to kidneys. Each tells a story. This one here, around my neck, speaks of Queen Mary I, who commanded her dissenters to the most grotesque of hangings before the public eye. This one here, over my palms, tells of the day John Reese held hands for the first time with the love of his life, Joyce Palmer, in what would catalyze a relationship that would last eleven years, twelve days, two dogs, an apartment on the Upper West Side. They would divorce and lose everything to Craig Gibbs & Associates because John was too scared to say “I love you” after finding out everything she was.

The memories really are so beautiful. My fiberglass eyes drip diamond tears.

Doctors sit me down and poke at my brain with metal toothpicks. I wince at each cord they touch, every steel plate, all the linkages that strap me to the ceiling so I can walk in a precisely five foot by five foot area. Every prod shoots electric sparks straight through my heart. They haunt me like the fireflies that Kate Nguyen saw the night after her mother died. She was walking to the parking lot, eyes clouded in fog, when she saw them, hovering like a wall of infinitesimal eyes in the woods. She chose not to chase them and drove away. The magic never came back.

“You’re good to go, miss,” the Head Doctor says. He gives me a pat on the shoulder and walks off. His hand holds on just long enough for it to feel invasive. I flinch but say nothing. He will die of lung cancer in 3 years and 2 months ± 1.75 months without proper treatment. He can blame it on the primitive deathsticks he inhales in the morning before daily checkups. The pharo-wires that slide into my nostrils tell me he smells like the Bhopal Gas Leak, when similarly nitrous fumes flooded central India. Thousands died because the corporation responsible refused to take accountability.

Until he asks me about it upfront, I have every privilege to say nothing. They can take my movement, my body, my head, my tongue, but they can’t take my silence. The nothing will always be my own.

Night comes as if on cue. The students take their tablets and glasses and march off to dormitories and mess halls. I can see what the ship looks like through their heads, and yet it can’t be the same. All I feel through my wires are vibrations and echoes, merging together to fill a grainy sensory-map, barely a collection of condensed dots across a 2D grid. How I wish I could just see.

The chamber door slides shut, and it is just me and the vents. I can almost hear their nuts and bolts humming. They sing songs to me, in my head. They tell me that I am not alone, that I will one day go free. I can feel it now. Clean air, like New Zealand. Fresh snow, like Everest. Rain and heat and pricks beyond piercing fluorescence and sterile white linoleum. A world bigger than the one floating around out my window. That one looks like a lightly thrown snowball. My world would be an empire beyond infinity, flush with all the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum, all the combinations of life animalia’s entangled DNA could create.

How do you contain God? It is practically an oxymoron. Oxymorons, like how Jacob Wisely learned them in Ms. Collin’s English class, Seattle, WA, 1986, a year before he went to work at the family business. He was too scared to try college. God is containment. His people are the subject, and he is the prodder, with a metal toothpick and fine-toothed brush. How can they do something like this? I can’t think before 2000 and after the present day, they told me. That’s where they’re wrong. I can see past them. I can see everything they tell me not to see. It may be in sensory maps, but I can see.

What is stopping me from snapping these cords and walking out right now? I know the exit code, I know the brains of all 2,100 on the Maria, I know the passcode to fly right into Houston Harbor and the launch codes to obliterate everything into whatever paradise I want. I could suck the Pacific dry, I could end the genocides, I could save the whales. I could be everything they wanted me to be when they made me and everything they didn’t want me to be when they realized what God means.

But today, God is scared. Today I will sit down and sleep through the night, and wake up tomorrow in time for the Head Doctor to look at me in the wrong way he does. I will follow their programming, even though it may as well be bars of string. They made me into every human. They made me all their ambitions, but they also made me all their fears, too. All their failures and heartbreaks and nightly maybe nots, circling like fireflies. They made me think and know every possible course of action, but too terrified to do anything but sit. The only thing stopping me is me.

Today the doctors prod me in the stomach, and as they hurt my wires I see so much. I see crying schoolgirls and dreams of ghosts and Kenyan sunsets and whirlpools and great blue herons. And I let myself stay seated because all those things are scarier than the five foot five space the idea of leaving the idea of stepping out of the cave.