Buried Desires Game
Stories similar to this that you might like too.
A few minutes later, I was sitting at a small table in the back of a dingy dive bar on the outskirts of town. My name is Jake and my goal today was to drink myself into oblivion—not that it seemed likely since I only had enough money for two beers and there weren’t many other customers here tonight.
Not like this place should have been open at all: It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet! The bartender gave me a dirty look when I ordered the two beers, but he knew not to argue with me if they were going to get any tips at all. The old man’s hands were shaking too badly.
He probably just couldn’t afford to buy his booze out of pocket anymore; maybe one of those bills belonged to him or one of them was a loan or something. Anyway, the beers came to the table without so much as a “keep the change” note scribbled on the tab. That would have been nice if we’d still lived in the city where I could tip him well instead of barely getting by myself.
The place was crowded enough that the people near me made it hard for me to focus on anything else except the beer itself and what the bartender had told me about them. It sounded like an interesting way to spend some time with friends…but there weren’t many of those in this part of town and none who looked like they would want to join me.
There might be a reason why no one ever bothered visiting this dump: They didn’t know any better. If someone from a big city heard about it, though, they might have more options than just drinking themselves numb.
I thought about how much nicer it would be to go somewhere like that and forget everything I cared about for a while. Then I remembered who I was trying to pretend I was and that it wouldn’t do any good because no one here would care about the game anyway. This is why I drink alone.
I took a long sip of the cold beer, then set the mug down carefully on the wooden surface before looking around the room again. A man in a leather jacket was talking loudly across from me about something, but I lost interest quickly since there hadn’t been anyone close enough to overhear us.
There was another guy at the bar and he was wearing a white shirt, black tie, and dark slacks, but it was hard to tell what he really looked like because the light was so dim. There were two women sitting nearby and they were whispering with each other about the same thing I was considering:
What kind of fun stuff they could get up to after the sun went down. One woman wore her blond hair pulled tightly back into a ponytail. She was older, maybe mid-thirties. Maybe she’d been married once, then divorced. Or maybe she wasn’t married now?
Who knows? As for the other woman, she looked younger and her long brown hair was hanging over one shoulder. Both women kept glancing at me every few seconds as if they wanted to ask me what I thought of the idea. They were probably wondering if I’d already done whatever it was they were talking about. I tried to ignore them and focused on finishing my beers.
When I finally put the empty mug down on the table beside me, a strange sensation filled my head. I was aware of the alcohol coursing through me and its effects on my ability to think clearly, but I didn’t feel drunk—only different.
It reminded me of one of those dreams where you’re suddenly awake and confused and unsure what just happened or if it actually did happen. But it wasn’t like a dream. No…It was as though I were suddenly more alive. More present in the moment, somehow.
“Hey, Jake,” said the bartender. He leaned over the bar and tapped me on the shoulder, then reached into his pocket. When he brought out two more bottles of beer, I felt relieved: The drinks I was about to drink were real. For a moment I thought about taking a third, then decided against it since the first two were making me more aware of everything than I liked.
He set the new beers between us on the table and left the bottles on top of the table, then turned around to lean his elbows on the bar and watch me. The man behind the bar was watching the TV mounted high overhead, but he stopped to listen. “You look like you need some help.”
I nodded but didn’t respond right away. Something about the man seemed familiar. I glanced around the room again but still couldn’t decide why I would have remembered him from anywhere.
Then, slowly, I realized the bartender wasn’t wearing his name tag and that he didn’t have his jacket on anymore, either. In fact, he didn’t seem to be wearing much aside from the plain black shirt under his work shirt. And his skin…was lighter than usual.
Not so pale as to make him unrecognizable, but definitely lighter. His eyes were a darker hue and there was something different about his mouth, but I couldn’t quite place what. He looked more like himself now than when I had come in.
As if reading my mind, he spoke up again. “Jake? Is someone bothering you?”
For a moment, I couldn’t remember who he was asking.
“No…” I started, then stopped myself. That wasn’t true. Someone had bothered me. Just not the man sitting opposite me. I didn’t know where to look to answer him correctly, though, so I looked at his face again without really seeing him until he caught my gaze and gave me a gentle shake of his head.
The bartender smiled briefly. “That’s good,” he said, then walked over to the man on the couch and whispered something to him.
I looked back at the television. There was an advertisement playing about a new product by one of the big pharma companies—something called a neuroprotector. Neuroprotector was one of those words that sounded important but meant nothing.
All it was was some sort of brain supplement to prevent mental fatigue—as if people needed help remembering things that hadn’t been worth remembering in the first place. It was one of those commercials I’d seen a dozen times before, but this time something stood out to me. I stared intently at the commercial and then blinked. Was it…
Yes, I decided finally; it must have been—the ad had mentioned the phrase “neuroprotectors,” too.
I watched another thirty seconds or so. The ad talked about how a study had shown the effectiveness of these “brain boosters”—something to do with a chemical imbalance in people who suffered from stress or fatigue—and that they worked best when taken regularly, which made sense because no one was going to use a pill to keep them sharp if they never took it again.
It ended with something along the lines of “If you don’t want to forget your own name, take a neuroprotector every morning!”
The man beside me snorted out a laugh at the punch line and slapped his hand on the armrest. “Good one,” he said, then sipped from his beer.
“What?” I asked him, looking up at him. “Are we allowed to talk here or not?”
He laughed again, louder this time, and shook his head. “Oh, sorry. Just got to be careful sometimes.” He waved the idea away with a flick of his hand. “I’ll try not to bother you again,” he added, then leaned over and clapped me on the shoulder.
When he straightened up again, his expression changed to surprise, which was followed quickly by confusion, then fear. He leaned forward and grabbed his forehead with both hands. “Fuck…” he muttered, then dropped his arms and looked up at me. “Sorry, Jake! Didn’t mean to freak you out or anything…” He held his palms out for me to see. They were covered in blood.
I pushed past him and ran to the men’s room, but the door wouldn’t budge. As soon as I tried to force it open, the lock clicked. I looked through the window in the door and saw it was a small office of sorts with three desks and a single computer.
A woman sat at one desk, holding a phone to her ear and talking quietly to whoever it was on the other end, but she stopped when she noticed me staring through the glass. She looked at the clock on the wall.
It was just after six o’clock.
“Is someone coming?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. The woman nodded once, then picked up the receiver. I heard muffled voices in the background, then one last word, and the dial tone returned. “They’re late,” she told me finally.
She hung up and turned back to look at me. “We don’t have any more supplies,” she said. “You need to leave now.”
I nodded and stepped out of the bathroom, but before I could step into the hall, she reached over and shut the door behind me. The lock clicked.
There was another bathroom farther down the hallway, but there weren’t any doors inside it. Just a sink, a toilet, and a mirror above a bench. The walls were tiled and looked like they had once been white. Now they were stained yellow from age.
The smell in the bathroom—that familiar mixture of piss and mold—was even worse than usual. I didn’t think I’d ever smelled anything quite so unpleasant. But that wasn’t why I looked up at the mirror.
I was trying to figure out what the woman had done to herself. What she thought was so bad about being old was that she would kill herself rather than get to live longer. Her skin looked pale, but her features were still clearly visible. She looked younger than me, but I didn’t feel that was enough to justify suicide.
Even if it happened to everyone sooner or later, why take yourself out? Why put yourself, or anyone else, through a life without you when you might find something worthwhile to do with your remaining years instead?
Something caught my eye in the reflection, however. There was something in her hair.
A piece of metal—it must have been a shard of something—had broken free while she was dying in there. That was what had scratched me when we kissed.
I looked back at the door. The woman from the waiting room seemed to be staring at me through the glass. I felt the same way she did: a little bit sick, a little bit angry, a little bit confused as well as relieved, because I hadn’t been sure at first whether I should tell anyone about the ad.
And if I’d told someone, they would have wanted me to go and talk to someone—to the police, probably. Someone would ask questions and I wouldn’t know where to start telling them. I wondered what it must be like to have a family.
To worry about someone you loved, and what would happen to them when you passed away, how you would leave them to handle things alone, all the while knowing that your time on earth was almost over and yours was the only one they would ever have.
My eyes drifted over to the toilet, to the pile of paper towels that were scattered across the floor next to it. I walked over slowly and crouched down beside one of them, pulling away its edge. It was a crumpled piece of paper, folded neatly into eight sections. I opened it up. One side was blank. The other was covered in handwriting, scribbled over with black ink like the kind I used to write my reports at work.
“Hello,” it read. “The end of the world has begun.” Then two words are written in bold letters underneath, in the same neat script. “Please call… “
***
I stood up suddenly and went back down the hall toward the men’s room. I didn’t look to see if the woman was watching me. I didn’t want to know who she was. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with her.
If she was too scared to live, why not take herself out before the world ended? But I knew that whatever made her act this way—the fact that she couldn’t face the thought of living for a few extra years and then dying—was no reason to follow suit.
I didn’t need to see what was under her bed. The message was clear enough. She had left it for someone else. For someone, hopefully, who was better able to deal with her loss than I was. And that meant I shouldn’t try calling either number she had written down.
I didn’t even know if they were real numbers. Maybe they were nothing more than random digits that would lead to dead air. Perhaps she had just thrown them out randomly. But perhaps they led to a person, and whoever answered would be the one responsible for what happened to the world after it stopped turning. They would be the last survivor.
And that person would probably kill themselves rather than continue to live without her.
I returned to my chair and sat back down. I was shaking. My fingers were curled together tightly against each other, gripping the armrests of the chair. It was the middle of the day outside; the streets below my apartment building were filled with people coming home from their jobs, walking their dogs, and talking to each other.
People always talked to me now. They would pass by in front of my window and wave politely, smiling as they spoke. It had started when I moved in here, but it got much worse since then. Everyone said hello to me, smiled at me, and sometimes tried to strike up a conversation.
But no one ever asked me what I thought about anything important. No one asked me how I felt or why I was doing certain things. I was just a face, a body on the street, a thing in the world, one of many that could easily be overlooked.
When you lived alone, it was easy to ignore people. You saw them every day and you didn’t have to speak to them if you didn’t want to. You didn’t need to hear what they had to say, either, because you could always avoid them if they annoyed you. Now that I lived near so many people, though, all those strangers, they were always around, and I had nowhere to hide.
It wasn’t that I minded being ignored most of the time. I just wished someone would notice me once in a while.
But no one noticed me anymore.
They were all still going about their daily routines. They weren’t noticing anything. Not even my presence in this room.
That night I took an old blanket from beneath my bed and draped it across the windowsill outside. The blanket was thick; I didn’t know if I’d have to wait until nighttime for it to be warm enough, but it might be worth the risk. At least then I would be able to sleep somewhere more comfortable than the couch downstairs.
I would close myself away in the bedroom, and the next morning I would open the blinds. I’d sit there and eat breakfast, and eventually, people would see me again—and they wouldn’t think twice about it. They would walk past the window and they would never remember seeing a man sleeping on the floor because he had nowhere else to go.
I waited a long time that evening, and finally, the sky darkened and it was dark. It was cold. I didn’t bother closing the windows, but I did bring the blanket closer to me so I could snuggle into it more comfortably. It helped.
After a while, my breathing slowed, and eventually, my heart began to slow down as well. I closed my eyes and slept soundly. When I woke in the morning, it was bright inside the bedroom, lit with sunlight that poured in through the slats in the blinds.
There was something strange about the light, however, and when I looked out the blinds, I found that it was only a faint blue-green glint, the sun hidden behind the clouds above. It must be raining, I told myself. It can’t be snowing already. Snow is too early. That’s when everyone would die.
I ate a bowl of cereal and drank three glasses of water. My throat was dry. After drinking my water I decided to venture out to see if anything had changed in the city—and also whether the weather was as bad as I believed it to be.
If it was, I would stay indoors and wait for it to melt, for spring to come back. If not, there was nowhere safer to be than outside. So I went down the stairs to the lobby, where I saw two people waiting at the elevator with me: an old lady sitting on a bench beside the door, and a man in his thirties, his head bowed over a clipboard.
Both of them wore gloves and hats and scarves, and both had their hoods pulled up. Their faces were hidden under their masks. I hadn’t seen anyone wearing a mask here before.
As we got into the elevator, the old lady smiled and whispered “hello” to me. She was short, and she had wispy gray hair and a pale complexion that was almost ghostlike. She had the same blank expression on her face as everyone else’s in the building, and she stared straight ahead, unmoving.
And then I recognized her face; there were lines of age around her mouth and on her forehead, and her skin was blotchy, with red patches of discoloration scattered randomly throughout. Her smile seemed forced, and when she turned to look at me again, there was no life in her eyes. Only emptiness.
The elevator doors slid closed. The old lady looked at the man standing beside me, and she spoke to him in some language I couldn’t understand. He replied with a grunt, but it sounded like she was telling him off. The lift began moving.
For a moment, the woman and the man sat beside each other and talked quietly together. They kept their voices low. The man’s shoulders heaved as he puffed his cheeks out. His voice became louder and louder as he spoke, and eventually, I stopped hearing him.
The elevator slowed to a stop, and the doors opened. Outside, there was no rain or snow. Just a gentle breeze that felt cool against my face. The old woman pushed herself up and walked past me. The man followed her out, and then they disappeared down the street.
The End