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“Didn’t this used to be the campus ministry retreat house?” I asked Professor Evory as we stood outside of the small cottage that would be my home for the next year.
It was quite a sight. While the light blue building was compact, the framing of the front overhang and the modest porch made it seem so much bigger and more welcoming from the driveway. Beside the small overhang, the large windows that lined the first floor seemed like eyes into the figurative soul of the structure, but they also stared out at me. They cast some sort of judgment on me, and I was afraid of what that accounting would bring.
Behind me, Professor Evory was racing to get my bags out of the trunk before I could, much to my chagrin. I hoped to be the one to do it, but that was a foolish thought. Of course he remembered what happened at the train station. Of course he was afraid of it happening again. Of course he did what he could to help me and prevent that sort of thing.
I flinched a bit as I put together that puzzle, as I realized how far the consequences of my earlier ineptitude really stretched. Beneath that heavy weight, I tried to sigh, to dislodge some of that burden, but I struggled with the action. While I got a taste of the crisp air and the faintest smell of grass and car exhaust, I couldn’t get much else in the way of air. My windpipe felt like a soda straw just sitting in my throat, taking in a steady but limited stream.
“That’s... what I heard,” he finally answered, struggling to speak as his body labored. “They got a bigger property for the retreat house, but this is a nice place. The provost wanted the university to keep it, so it had to be repurposed. Or so I heard.”
I turned back to the small cottage. Whether or not that rumor was true, I could understand the desire to hold onto this place. It wasn’t the sort of home that would come up on the market too often, especially given its location on the edge of town, overlooking a small creek that wasn’t actually on the property, as I learned later. There were a few trees about, more in the distance as one drew deeper into the forest around Dustford. Or the whole town had once been a forest, and the land was trying to return to that before state.
Before Professor Evory could object and while he was still fishing for the key in his pocket, I took the two smaller bags from him. “I was here before. My dorm used this house for our yearly retreats. I never missed one.”
He grimaced as I took the bags but said nothing, lest he cause an argument that neither of us really wanted. Besides, there were the others to contend with. As he pulled them along, we walked up the stone pathway to the front door. It was the same collection of slightly discolored rocks from my student days. One chip had managed to stand out, from when someone down the hall tripped and fell. Her rosary bracelet won the battle with the rock on impact, which hadn’t seemed possible, but the rock was chipped and the cross survived. And that’s a story I knew they had to still be telling in Penhale Hall.
When we opened the door, the glimpses of the past came to an abrupt end, however. The furniture had been replaced. It was no longer the mismatched, hastily acquired set I remembered campus ministry providing. With that, a pang of sadness hit me, but realistically, I should have expected that. The old furniture was about to fall apart, and even before then, when it was still somewhat usable, it wasn’t fit for someone of the sort of worth and status that received fellowships like this.
(Maybe you can see why I missed the furniture. We had a lot in common.)
Professor Evory left shortly thereafter, handing over the keys and giving me one last hug as he headed out the door. And I–the ever-devoted student–watched him go from one of the front windows. I watched him walk back to his car, balling up the curtain in my fist as Professor Evory looked back. His eyes seemed to linger, as if they were meeting mine through the glass. But they weren’t. The windows were tinted, masking my presence. But on the off chance he could see me, I mustered up a small smile for him, to tell him that I was going to be okay.
But like when Ellie left me after that more apparent breakdown, I couldn’t stay in that melancholy state for long. I had a task to do or the many tasks that needed to be done for me to be fully settled in. Unpacking would take time, and it would all be time I didn’t have to spend thinking about my troubles or where I found myself, figuratively or otherwise.
It was hard to be in that retreat house, though, I would admit. That surprised me. After all, familiarity was supposed to be comforting. But far from it for me. The ghosts of my old memories did not make for the best roommates.
I loved those retreats with my dormmates. My temporary sisters, I wanted to call them. At first glance, that term didn’t quite fit, but the word had a specific meaning to me. There was a lingering ache that came with it that was also unique to it. I wanted to still be close to them, to see and talk and share details of our lives like we used to, but they had faded from my life mere months after graduation.
Our only tethers were found in online spaces. Yet another reason to stay on social media, I thought. It was the only way I could get any news about them. One young woman died in 2016, and I wouldn’t have known had it not been for those websites. But it wasn’t shown to me like you might expect. There wasn’t a post on a timeline or a sorrowful eulogy for Viola typed out amongst the memes and edited vacation pictures. Rather, I was searching for another person on Facebook. On a whim, I had wondered what happened to a young man from Stella Maris I had a crush on who thought he was going to be a priest but had lingering doubts. Instead of finding out what he had decided, I found his post about attending her funeral months before. In fact, it had been nearly a year by then, since Viola had died.
It stung a bit, but I could deal with it. I understood how and why I was the last to know. Of course, no one told me. I had no right to know. Not anymore. Once upon a time, I did, but once upon a time, I also had a living father, so yeah, things change, often for the worse. But I was still bitter and hurt at the revelation all the same. Or it was easier to feel that way because it was a distraction from the full weight of her death. It just wasn’t fair. Viola was so young and well-loved when she was struck down. And she was her parents’ only daughter after four sons. And if God and I didn’t already have such a strained and tumultuous relationship already, we would have had words about it. But even on days when I can believe in Him, I don’t want to say anything about her death. No answer would suffice.
I lingered in the front room wondering if I would hear Viola’s laugh drifting through the hallways. She was also a frequent attendee of these retreats, and we were often grouped together by chance. Not a random draw on the day but by the chance of our births. Our surnames were both towards the end of the alphabet, so when groups were made by nothing but quick lines drawn across the page, we were often grouped together. And when we would be, there was an air of relief that washed over me. Because I knew she would hold the group together, me included.
Really, the question I was left with in the wake of her death wasn’t one of fairness or morality. It was a selfish one. What did it mean for me if the person who ensured I had a place was gone? That was what she always did for me. That was the sort of service I needed that she had so reliably provided. I would be off by myself, and Viola would just appear to ask why I was off to the side alone when the whole group was talking about some event or happening on campus. When I didn’t answer–because of course I couldn’t find the words to explain myself and I didn’t feel like I fit into this world at all–she would just take me by the hand and lead me to the spot she had made for me.
But as I stood, lingering in that front room, I reminded myself that she wasn’t going to come. And I was never going to hear her laugh again. The silence of the empty former retreat house only drilled that point in. And with that emphasis, things felt so much more unbearable.
I looked towards my bags, trying to remember where I had packed my speakers only to realize that they were on my bed at home, in a tote bag that I was totally going to grab when I had the chance, but the moment I looked away from it, the thought left my mind. And the speakers were left on the bed. But that shouldn’t have been a big deal. Speakers aren’t usually a necessity, but they were a critical part at keeping me sane and at keeping the ghosts of so many saints and monsters alike away from me.
My mind went blank as I stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what it was I was going to do. But as the thoughts gradually returned, the first one was to wince in frustration. My hands came to rest on the top of my head, as if I could shield myself from those figurative blows in the same way I could literal ones, but that didn’t really work.
My phone would. It wasn’t as loud without those speakers, but it still had some range. And it was better than nothing.
I took my phone out of my back pocket as I stepped through the house, going through the motions of checking out my new home and relearning what I had once known all too well. It was still recognizable. The sunroom out back was still there, and it still overlooked that small creek and the tree line where Viola had once spotted a deer.
She had never seen one before. Neither had I. And the girls who had–usually when hunting with their dads–kept their own thoughts on the matter to themselves and stepped out of the way of those of us who felt compelled to gawk.
The memory was unusually vivid. I half-expected to see that deer pop out again, greeting me and wondering where everyone else was.
‘Is it just you?’ it might think, and if it did, it would probably be just as rude and biting about it as any creature could be.
Deer have a majesty about them, sure, but that doesn’t really stop them from being assholes, especially in the hypothetical scenarios someone trying to find a distraction might conjure.
‘Yeah, it’s just me,’ I’d tell the deer back.
And we’d both pretend I didn’t notice the deer’s disappointment before it wandered back into the forest, leaving me even more alone than when it first arrived. Quite the achievement, really.
As I thought of that, I aimlessly clicked through the menus and apps on my phone, leading me to some video essayist I had subscribed to a while ago, the king that took great pains on every little detail in their hour-long videos. And it always paid. The extended time between uploads–sometimes extending to well over a month–wasn’t an inconvenience but a promise of quality.
Pheasantics, as they were known, took pride in making insightful video essays, at the expense of whatever advantage appeasing the algorithm with more constant uploads might have gotten them. In that exchange, however, they received a more loyal and reliable fan base than anything the algorithm could have given them. I counted myself among those masses. After all, they were still something I could rely on. New content might have been unpredictable, but the old videos remained. And I replayed them in moments like this: when I was too distracted by a need to escape to pick an escape route.
A red dot to the upper right of that creator’s icon–a stylistic painting of their face–promised a new video was out. To me, that was a sign. This was where I needed to go. There was no need to think any more of it. I could just play the video and let the sound wash over me as I got situated. Or even just figured out what it meant to get situated.
I didn’t read the video title or really glance at the thumbnail. Without any thought (because that strategy worked so well for me), I dove in.
As the video loaded, my mind wandered off. Is the Wi-Fi even set up, I asked myself. That seemed like an important issue given how the world was. Case in point, I was using my phone for internet access, specifically for a video that would use a fair bit of data. I thought I had read somewhere in the agreement that internet access was provided, but then again, I hardly read the agreement at all. There was nothing in it that could have deterred me, and I doubted that there was some monster planted in the fine print. This was my alma mater we were talking about, and Professor Evory would have warned me if there were a real problem.
Then again, “provided” didn’t mean “set up.” I would have to do that. And to make that possible, there had to be a binder somewhere, some sort of instruction manual on how to make myself comfortable in the most basic, general ways, like having internet access.
Meanwhile, the video continued to load. My phone struggled to receive a strong signal this far out from town. But while there was some frustration that moments continued to tick on in silence, I wasn’t fully ready to give up hope on it yet. And if I found the internet information, this binder I had conjured in my mind, then it wouldn’t matter anyway. So I just kept waiting and looking and hoping. It was almost like I was stuck in that pattern, in that track, and on that repeating loop.
Or I was until the data all just fell into place, and the video started. A soft piano note came first, then a second, but in time, as the faint music kept playing, Pheasantics’ voice filled the room.
“It’s hard to know how to start a video like this,” Pheasantics began.
The binder would have to be in the kitchen, right? Maybe at the island that was installed right before the university bought the house. It was largely untouched, though the countertop had been replaced with a dark marble. I could see that long before I stepped into the space.
“In 2013, I started making video essays largely as a joke. A goof, if you will. I was always the sort of person to run a joke into the ground, to take a gag and reach the ultimate conclusion. Not the natural one. Oh no. I wouldn’t settle for just that. I have to go to the end of the proverbial line. I just ride that train all the way to the end of the tracks even if that means going off the edge of a cliff.”
I chuckled darkly for a moment, but as I was otherwise occupied with some sort of quest for an item I mentally created, that was all I could do right then.
“Which meant that when I got into a conversation with a friend about a movie I didn’t like. Think, uh, sparkly fangs, if you know what I mean.”
I did know what they meant. The thought of that infamous vampire series pulled a small groan from deep within my core. It had been assigned reading when I was in high school. The teacher hoped it could be inspirational, a reminder of what students could create if they just sat down to write a story, but by then, the trend of mocking that series was already well engraved into the popular psyche. Regardless of intentions, the point of the lesson was well and truly lost.
The video continued, my reminiscing aside. “Instead of just leaving it there, I just had to make a full-blown PowerPoint presentation on the many problems I had with that film, all the corners that were cut with the adaptation, and how all that pretentious color filtering was amateurish at best.”
I laughed again. Pheasantics was not wrong. Even when I could get myself to admit that those movies weren’t entirely unenjoyable, the filters tired the eyes.
“From there, it’s just a natural progression from that kind of nerddom to making video essays on YouTube. The mindset is the same from PowerPoint to long form video content, even if we have to learn new software and our choice in topics is far, far more limited.”
The sunroom sucked up all of the cottage’s natural light, leaving little for the kitchen and dining area. I was left pawing around for the light switch. As I did so, I caught the faintest whiff of all the cleaning products that had been used to clean this space, to prime and polish it to a perfection I was incapable of appreciating.
“Usually, I make videos about movies or television shows. Hell, even paintings,” Pheasantics went on. “And can you blame me for that? YouTube is a visual medium. There’s only so many ways I can keep the video interesting without anything to show you.”
I didn’t find the light switch. But as I searched, my eyes adjusted enough to scan the surroundings to see the nothingness ahead. There was no binder on the island, counter or table. I pulled a drawer or two that would have been close to the right shape for a binder or stack of meaningful pages, but when they too were empty, I walked into the living room, still clutching my phone in my hand.
“But honestly, with the recent news that Studio 35 had acquired the rights to make a movie adaptation of one of my favorite novels, the idea for this video just kind of clicked.”
Studio 35 were the ones adapting my book too. They were a respectably sized studio in Hollywood, but they weren’t as profit-driven as some of the others. They straddled that line between independent freedom and financial security rather well. I liked that about them, and I had thought their approach to their other projects was reason to be hopeful that they would do right by my book.
Also, they were prepared to not have me be involved if I didn’t want to be. Which was nice. It took a lot of pressure off my shoulders.
I kept half-listening to the video. Some of Pheasantics’ best essays were about Studio 35 productions, so this promised to be more than worthwhile. But I could only give it so much of my attention. There was something else I needed to do. And so my eyes continued to scan every inch for some sort of clue as to what to do or how to get myself set up to live here.
“Because you would think that as a lover of the book, I’d be dreading the news, right? The author, Judith Hynes, has gone on record multiple times saying she doesn’t think hers is the sort of book that will adapt well unless the right team is behind it.”
My heart stopped at the sound of my pen name in that YouTuber’s voice. No way, I thought. No fucking way.
Truth be told, because who can really judge me for what I write in this book when I’ve already written so many stupid things elsewhere, I’ve never kept up with what other people said about my first book. I was dreading the inevitable backlash, the sea of criticisms that would cut to my very core, and there was nothing I could do about those things anyway. The book was printed and distributed. There were too many copies bought for there to be any hope in pulling them all back. Whatever my sin was in releasing that book, it couldn’t be undone. And I was already sorry enough as it was. There was nothing to gain but suffering.
So right then, I should have shut the video off. I should have clicked away from the video, closed the app, turned off the phone, or chucked said phone into the small stream of water where a deer may or may not have been watching my breakdown. But I didn’t. For some reason, with some sort of haze falling over me, I instead drifted over to the couch and lowered myself, settling into whatever this video would bring me.
But I wasn’t thrilled about it. I felt a tightness in my throat, like I was being choked or suffocated or was drowning. I was being swallowed up by a force I couldn’t fight or even see. And yet, I was being seen or perceived in some way. There was a sea of figurative eyes washing over me, even though no one was there to gawk at me directly. Even without the lights and the eyes of a studio audience, I was still being judged and rated. It was through my work, sure, but the weight of perception and scrutiny is always a heavy one to shoulder.
I wasn’t strong enough for that. I could feel the gradual crushing of my bones. That was yet another pain to add to the pile, another point of suffering. Even before that additional piece was added to the puzzle, the situation was unbearable.
And my dad would have agreed.
But of course, Pheasantics had no way of knowing the effect this was having on me, and unless I paused the video, their voice would continue to fill the space around me. I should have paused the video. I did not.
“And honestly, I think if The Friend of Damnation had any chance of getting a proper adaptation. It’s from the folks at Studio 35.”
Hope rushed over me. This video was still about Studio 35, right? They were a fairly hot topic since one of their films won their first Oscar last year. I was fine with just being set dressing for a video like that. Decorations are not always truly seen or acknowledged, just noticed in passing or even remarked upon. They don’t stick in the mind, though. And that’s what made that status bearable for me.
“The Friend of Damnation is a 2015 book by Judith Hynes, and it tells the story of a young woman called Maia who is being haunted by the Devil. Whose name is just Devil, by the way. It gets a little confusing, but just go with it, it works. And Devil moves into her apartment not because she’s being punished or anything but because Devil is fascinated by her. He’s fascinated by a human being who can intend nothing but break everything. And given that, as Devil puts it, ‘breaking souls’ is a part of his job, he’s taken a brief sabbatical from Hell to get to the root of Maia’s skills.”
I closed my eyes. It was such a stupid premise, wasn’t it? I didn’t know why I had actually put pen to page on that. It wasn’t the sort of idea I should have committed to. It should have been a passing thought or a note in a journal I lost when moving. That’s a part of the writer’s life that no one really talks about, but it serves a vital function when it comes to reducing glut in the market.
Knowing that, I kept my eyes closed as the video went on. “We, the reader, join in during the last night of Devil’s sabbatical when he is at his most frustrated and outright perplexed at how Maia is the way that she is. So he sits down and forces Maia into one last conversation. Or interrogation, you might say.”
There was a part of me that earnestly wondered what visuals Pheasantics had pulled up for this video. The devil wasn’t an uncommon feature in movies or TV. Any of those portrayals would work as a stand in. But Maia had a very distinct look about her. She was mixed race and far from conventionally attractive. The lines of her face were blurred, some might say. And her features carried a distinct sadness that was impossible to ignore. She wasn’t the sort of face that showed up a lot in Hollywood productions.
And that might sound like speculation, but I knew it to be true. I knew it because that was my face, hidden and kept out of everyone’s view.
“But this final conversation between the two of them ends up pulling away from Maia’s present state and to her past, to the various incidents and ‘breaks,’ as she calls them, that fundamentally shaped the person she was to become,” Pheasantics explained. “At some point towards the end of the book, Maia describes herself as a broken piece of porcelain. It had been whole once, but then it was dropped. Repeatedly. And now it–and by extension she–is a collection of sharp pieces, ready to draw the blood of whoever tries to pick them up.”
Ellie’s face flashed in my mind. I tried to push it back, but no matter how deeply I buried it, I could still faintly catch a glimpse of her eyes, lurking in my mind. And that was partially my fault. This was what it meant to not want to let someone go. This was the consequence of such a desperate grip.
Pheasantics continued, “And really, that’s been her secret. She’s not actively setting out to do harm to anyone. Quite the opposite in fact. People who don’t know better have just tried to pick her up. Then the inevitable happened.”
They were spot on. That was the theme I had picked out and built my story around. It wasn't hard to find in the text, though, and I was more than a bit ashamed about that. Clearly, I didn’t know how to be subtle. I wasn’t a good enough writer to be subtle.
I wasn’t a good enough writer. Full stop.
“Neither Maia nor Devil really go into what she has done or how she’s hurt other people at any point in the book. We get references but nothing concrete. Which puts the reader in a weird place. Because, in theory, our protagonist could have done anything. We just know she did something bad enough to catch the Devil’s attention, but it’s not the sort of act that requires intention. So we know she didn’t assault or kill someone. But also, we don’t know if she’s really being haunted by the devil.”
I scoffed. Of course, she was. I, as the writer, had meant for her to be haunted by the devil, ergo, she was being haunted by the devil.
“Maia and Devil are the only characters in the present, though the majority of the book is Maia flashing back to her tumultuous past. So there’s no other character who can confirm or deny that there’s some supernatural being following Maia around. There’s no one there at all. Maia has self-isolated, to the point that she could have gone mad.”
With that, I fell back against the couch and let the phone drop onto the floor beside me. Despite the impact, the video kept playing. The small fall hadn’t been enough to deter it or shut it up. And that seemed fair. It wasn’t the phone’s fault I had been crushed by this unseen weight.
Is this how Ray Bradbury felt about his most famous work, I wondered. The one that was constantly explained to him no matter how loudly he tried to proclaim his truth? Didn’t he have to walk out of a lecture about his book Fahrenheit 451 when no one wanted to listen to him explain what he had meant when he wrote the novella? It’s not about censorship or about us being denied the right to care about something. Rather, it’s about how unlikely we are to do it. It’s about how medium changes left us vulnerable to being numbed or dumbed down in some way. And we let it happen.
Or maybe I had that in the wrong order. Maybe I attributed the wrong interpretation to the wrong person. There must be something poetic about my not being able to remember the one thing I might have had in common with a literary giant, but I was never one for poetry.
“Maia’s isolation is really at the heart of her problems, but it’s also well-meaning. She pulled away from the world to keep the hurts she’s suffered from being passed on or to keep herself from repeating them. She recognizes everything that’s wrong in her flashbacks, all the things people in her life failed to do or did incorrectly or shouldn’t have done, but she can’t really trust herself to not fall into those same patterns. She doesn’t know how to not care without being destructive.”
No, I really don’t.
“But Devil does. And he almost takes pity on her, telling her that the answers he needed to progress through his journey weren’t in his domain. He had to branch out into the world to find what he needed. And Maia has to do the same. The answers she seeks aren’t in her home, but that’s where she locked herself away.”
I had wanted to put the word ‘Hell’ in place of the word home in that passage, but my editor wouldn’t let me. Something about it being too needlessly dark or conflicting in some way. I just listened and did what she said, but I didn’t take anything to heart. Frankly, I still thought I was in the right. In other passages, I had described Maia’s small apartment as a nest or a haven. Maybe I even used the word heaven. I couldn’t fully remember. But to my editor, Angela, ‘Hell’ created a contradiction she couldn’t allow. Maybe she would have if I explained myself better, but I didn’t want to have the conversation. I just changed the line.
“Ultimately, The Friend of Damnation is a story whose strength and really its beauty lies in its simplicity.”
At that, I flinched. It wasn’t that Pheasantics was wrong, per say, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to think about. The story wasn’t beautiful, and in so far as it was strong, it was because I wasn’t juggling too much of a world or too many characters or too many details. It was a story predominantly told in dialogue and stray acts around the kitchen. The flashbacks that made up every other chapter were somewhat disjointed. And while I had lied in interviews and said that was the point, it really wasn’t. This wasn’t Maia struggling to remember or feeling overwhelmed by a past that can only come to her in flashes lest it completely destroy her. In reality, there was no larger meaning behind that accident of an untalented mind feigning creativity.
I didn’t know how anyone could read that book and not realize how bad of a writer I was. In the text, plain as day, I had laid out all the things I couldn’t do and propped myself up on shortcuts and cut corners. I wasn’t what they thought I was. But I was very good at pretending.
Case in point: readers always thought Maia needed to leave her home to go out and live her life. Everyone always agreed with Devil, despite him being the literal devil. No one could see that Devil wanted what was bad for the world and for Maia. They just took what he said at face value, as if he were any other voice in her head. They would listen and think to themselves that Maia needed to go out and find her new way of being, just like the devil did without any thought to the consequences, of which there were many.
No good writer fucks up their point that badly, right?