Peripheral Visions: The Grieving Room

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

The Grieving Room

Vin fled to the men's room and locked himself into a stall. He tried to stifle his sobs as he pressed his face into the sleeve of his suit jacket, but his grief echoed through the room. Fortunately, no one else was there – otherwise he would have been liable to a HR complaint.

The sobs weren't all Vin struggled to contain. A seething fury and grief pressed him from within. He thought a scream might erupt at any moment. He fought not to let that happen. He knew if he started screaming, he might not stop.

Vin sobbed for three minutes... four... six. He wrapped his arms around himself in an effort to keep himself from exploding into embers of pain.

Finally, the tidal swell of emotion passed. Exhausted, Vin leaned against the side of the stall for a minute or two, wiping at his eyes and sighing. Then he stepped out and walked toward the sinks.

Someone was there, he realized with a start. It was Seth, a tall, quiet man who Vin hardly knew.

"I'm sorry to intrude on your moment," Seth said.

Vin waved him away and turned to the sink. He let water fill his cupped hands, then dashed cold water over his face to wash away the swelling around his eyes. It wasn't going to work very well, he knew, but it would help a little.

Seth was still standing there.

"Thanks, but I'm fine," Vin told him, anxious to head off a lecture about workplace etiquette.

"No, you're not," Seth said.

Vin wasn't sure whether to be surprised at this, or offended, or both.

"You lost someone, didn't you?" Seth asked.

Vin stared at the water in the sink, feeling embarrassed and caught put, and not wanting to have this conversation.

"Someone close," Seth said. "A friend? A family member?" He seemed to hesitate for a moment before he added: "A lover?"

Vin didn't answer.

"It's okay," Seth said. "I don't want to pry. But I do understand what it feels like, to be expected to clamp down on a storm inside yourself, fit thunder and lightning and deluges into a strict and narrow bottle of professional presentation. I do know what grief feels like, and how trying to gloss it over only makes it worse. It's a tidal wave or an earthquake... and you don't know if it's going to carry you away, or break you into pieces."

Vin activated the sink's blow-dry function and rubbed his damp hands under the hot air. "Yep," he said, bringing his warm, dry hands to his face to mop up the water that clung to his skin, then thrusting his hands under the air flow again.

"It's impossible to have feelings anymore," Seth said, not picking up on Vin's attempt to signal that he wanted to be left alone. "It's some sort of a crime or a policy violation to rise your voice or to have a moment's frustration. It's some kind of horrible misstep to suffer a moment when grief overcomes you."

Vin shook his head, not trusting that his voice wouldn't quaver and crack if he tried to speak.

Seth did the talking for him.

"We're feeling creatures, though. We love, we rage, we hurt. Deeper than our convictions, more powerful than our words are our feelings. Irrational, undeniable... wild. And detested. And penalized."

"Look, can you leave me alone?" Vin asked.

"Not quite yet," Seth said, his voice soft – soft, but not especially gentle. His words were understanding; they summarized what Vin would have said if he had been able to put what he was feeling into words. But his demeanors didn't possess any warmth or empathy. Vin wondered for a moment whether Seth might be a Siliconian – an android that looked human but didn't necessarily have the software needed to imitate human emotional responses.

Vin dismissed that thought at once. There were plenty of conspiracy theories about the Owners replacing human workers with Siliconians, but Vin had never believed them. Siliconians were useful for certain sorts of in-person service jobs, but it wasn't cost effective to make a Siliconian accountant look and sound human, and it didn't increase productivity to fit a laborer to the two arms and two legs of a human frame. Vin worked with budgets, and he knew that in these ways – and other, more nuanced ones – Siliconians weren't as cost effective as human beings... at least, not while human beings were kept in boxes of expectation, hemmed in with punishment and rewards. When the reward was simply a lack of further punishment, that made humans even more cheap. Siliconians, on the other hand, involved massive initial costs that outstripped even the considerable outlay of human childrearing. They could work flawlessly, tirelessly, and for up to a century at a time, but when an executive's performance was based on quarterly cost-to-profit ratios, and when human workers were so plentiful and so easily manipulated into working long hours for so little recompense, the short-term margins clearly favored the exploitation of organic human workers over investment into synthetic ones.

Then, too, whenever Owners wanted to replace human work forces with machines, they simply went ahead and did it. There was no gesture at either apology or furtiveness by using human lookalikes. The Owners didn't care what their human subjects thought about business affairs or anything else.

Still, Seth seemed far colder than a normal person. Vin shrugged to himself; Seth had always been standoffish, but so, too, were others at the office. This was the corporate world: Everything was about numbers. In the old days, Vin thought, ambitious young men had made it a contest to see who could be the mot aggressive, the most toxically masculine... all of that was different now. The boozing and blow had been bad for the bottom line. Discipline and focus were the watchwords at the company, and anyone who disrupted efficiency, or caused a stir, or made anyone else feel uncomfortable was liable to be written up or even fired.

Seth, as though reading his mind, spoke to that with his next words.

"All we are allowed are the most anodyne, insincere expressions of social courtesy," Seth said. "Everyday life in the office is hard already. But add in emotional stress? A divorce... family problems... money woes... bad luck... or even a joyous occasion, like the birth or a child or a wedding – anything that causes ripples on the placid surface of the office culture, and it's not acceptable. It is, in HR-speak, 'concerning.' A word I loathe."

Vin couldn't help but agree with that, even as he wished Seth would shut up and go away.

"It's impossible, isn't it?" Seth continued. "You bite down hard, plaster a shallow, meaningless smile over your most powerful emotions, and then go home to scream into a pillow or dance around naked in your living room. At least, people used to do that, until the company made it part of our contracts that they could install monitoring devices in our homes, 'to ensure compliance with the high moral standards of our corporate culture.' Which is Ownerspeak for no one but them being allowed a scrap of pleasure, or even pain – anything that smacks of humanity, because humanity is a special status they have reserved for themselves. The rest of us are only drones."

"What are you talking to me for?" Vin asked, his voice sharp and angry. He recoiled from his own harsh tone. This was exactly what Seth was talking about, and he was right; for lashing out the way he had, Vin could be reprimanded; have his pay docked; be demoted or dismissed.

But Seth didn't react to Vin's anger. He didn't flinch; he didn't frown; he didn't smile in triumph at having pushed Vin into a heated response.

Instead, he held out what looked like an old-fashioned business card.

Vin glanced at the card. "What is this?" he asked.

"Take it," Seth said. "It looks like you need it."

Vin hesitated, but not for long; he'd already been away from his desk for almost ten minutes. Dereliction was another firable offense. He had to keep the keystrokes coming; he had to log meeting time; he had to register as active on the graphics design interface. Otherwise, he was steaking from the company... stealing productivity, slacking off.

Vin sighed and snatched the business card from Seth's hand, then made his way briskly out of the men's room and back to work.

***

Home again after his twelve-hour shift, and after an hourlong, stressful commute using city transit, Vin slumped on the couch. It was eight o'clock at night. A year ago... even eight months ago... he and Derek would have snuggled on the couch together for a couple of hours before going to bed, seeking a little downtime as they watched TV, or listened to music, or drank a little wine and talked.

Now there was no one to share the couch with, and the heaviness in his heart seemed to drag him toward the bed, which waited on the other side of the partition.

Dereck's illness had lasted eight months. He's been able to keep working until the last six weeks, but finally he was too weak and disoriented to keep up with his job. He chose to resign instead of suffering the black mark on his personal record that getting fired would leave. "Not that any of it matters anymore," Dereck had said in a fatalistic voice.

That wasn't strictly true. Garner even one black mark on your personal record, and you could lose service access. Delivery drones might not be routed to your apartment; the power and water could be cut by companies wary of "unreliable" customers; banks could penalize you by imposing fees; municipalities could levy fines. The worst thing of all was that the Owners who ran the city's housing could throw a person out of their apartment and into the streets thanks to a black mark.

Quitting a job was considered a mark of someone brave and entrepreneurial – if a little reckless. That got you a mark, too, but a blue mark wasn't the kiss of death that a black mark was.

Derek had known that however long he had left, he would want a home and video service and the ability to send and receive messages. He would want to hear from his parent and his siblings. He would want to chat with friends. He would want to die in his own bed, not in an alleyway, and while he could hope for a peaceful death from the illness, the streets would mean a violent end for someone sick and weak. Ever since the prisons had been closed and judges began sentencing convicts to years on the street, the ecosystem outside the city's internal barriers – the translucent walls that separated the inner sanctum from the urban wilds – was one in which only the strong survived... and even for exiles cast out of the city's protected districts, strength was a resource that was rapidly depleted.

Vin's sadness welled up again, along with his rage. The way Derek had suffered; the way people were treated, be they sick or well; the way the world ran, or, better put, the way the Owners chose to run the world... it was all so cruel, all so needless, and all so maddening.

Vin felt another surge of fury and grief overwhelming him. The couch didn't have throw pillows; he shrugged off his suit jacket, managed to fold it more or less neatly, and then pressed his face dep into the cloth and bellowed, his voice muffled.

At least the building's soundproof walls would prevent the neighbors from hearing him and complaining.

When he was calm again... calm and exhausted, exhausted and calm; the two states were one and the same these days... Vin smoothed out his jacket and checked to be sure he hadn't stained it with snot and saliva. He ran his hand along the sleeves to press out wrinkles. He put his hand in the pockets to be sure he hadn't absent-mindedly stuck anything into them that might ruin the suit's line. That was when he remembered the business card Seth had given him.

Pulling the card out of the jacket pocket, Vin looked it over. It seemed to be made of paper, but the paper was not bend or crimpled despite the way he'd quickly shoved the card into his pocket. The card was perfectly straight-edged, perfectly flat. On one side there was a QR code. On the other were three words:

THE GRIEVING ROOM

"The Grieving Room?" Vin said to himself.

***

Vin approached Seth as unobtrusively as he could the following day, timing his use of the elevator with Seth's own.

"What is that card you gave me?" he murmured softy, not looking at Seth. The elevator had cameras and microphones; the two dared not seem to be fraternizing, because that could lead to suspicion that they were somehow conspiring, and that suspicion, in turn, could trigger an investigation. Even though any such probe would turn up nothing – Vin was confident about that – the very fact that a probe had happened, therefore costing the company time and money, would result in a red mark on his record.

"Did you scan the QR code?" Seth asked.

"No."

"Scan the QR code."

The elevator dinged and the doors opened. The conversation was over.

***

Another day done, Seth slumped on the couch. The transit system was getting worse and worse, with trains not showing up on time and then arriving one after the next. The cars were badly maintained and the one he'd ridden home in didn't have any functioning lights. The only illumination came through the muddy, discolored barrier that separated the city dwellers from the exiles on the street. The city's air was getting worse, too – though it was a far cry from the toxic fumes that the exiles had to breathe.

One glimmer of interest and curiosity broke the monotony of the workday's weary rhythms and the city's drab disrepair. Vin pulled the card out of his jacket pocket and looked it over once again. The card was still not bent or creased, not even at the corners; it was as crisp as if it had been printed mere moments before. It couldn't have been made of ordinary paper, but Vin couldn't have said what it was. Plastic? Some kind of new organic fiber? Carbon composite?

Vin flipped the card over and flipped it over again. A QR code; the mysterious words "The Grieving Room."

Well, grieving was the problem. He hadn't had any moments of emotional upheaval today; he was too tired. But there was a constant hollowness that sharpened into an ache, and, beneath all of that, a despair that felt like broken glass to his soul.

Maybe this service, whatever it was, really could help him. Maybe Seth was trying to be kind – an incongruous thought, given how remote Seth seemed otherwise. People were still people, even now, even in places like the office. Matilda snuck him a wink every now and then, and Marcus' face registered the ghost of a smile whenever they chanced to meet. Open expressions of friendship were forbidden and labeled "sexual harassment," and some people had stopped saying "Good morning" recently, following a complaint someone had lodged against a co-worker with the claim that "good" was a term applicable only to moral actions, and using it to refer to a time of day was an attempt at socialist indoctrination.

Despite all of that, there remained an undercurrent – driven deep underground, and muffled by caution and exhaustion that most people shared – so that a kind of empathic electricity still flowed. Attraction, dissatisfaction, optimism... Vin encountered a range of human emotions from other people every day. Sometimes he wasn't sure how he picked up on those feelings. Maybe some kind of primitive animal telepathy? However it happened, it was still an essential part of human society, even a society as repressive and forbidding as the one he lived in.

But not from Seth. In Seth's case, there was nothing... he was a blank, an emotional cutout, a shadow. Other people possessed a fullness; Seth seemed vacant.

And yet, Seth had taken the time and effort to express some measure of fellowship and offer him this card.

Vin retrieved his phone from the jacket's inside pocket and scanned the QR code. The phone's lumentic screen went into 3D mode and Vin realized the phone had automatically initiated a call. He started to shut the call down, unnerved, but someone had already answered: A young woman with auburn hair and bright blue eyes.

"Good evening," the young woman said. "This is the Grieving Room, and I'm Alanna. Are you experiencing bereavement?"

Even though she was a holo in the screen's projected 3D field, and even though Vin suspected she might be an AI, Alanna seemed to possess such an attentive and sympathetic manner that Vin instantly felt more relaxed. His apprehension fell away.

"Do you want to discuss your options for how to handle bereavement, and how we might help?" Alanna asked.

"Yes," Vin said. More powerful emotions were suddenly surging in him. He realized it was the simple matter of being heard by someone who seemed empathetic that was causing this new upwell of feelings. Fresh tears filled his eyes, and Vin experienced a sense of relief. Even if Alanna were an AI, she wasn't giving him the same sense of vacancy that Seth had. She was making him feel connected and understood.

"Who have you lost?" Alanna asked gently.

The whole story poured from Vin: How he and Derek had met twelve years ago and been together ever since; how they had eventually ended up living together in Vin's apartment; how their neighbors, who had never seemed fond of Vin, had taken to Derek right away, and how Derek, with his knack for people, had smoothed their shared life in so many ways.

More essential than all of this, though, was the sheer animal comfort of coming home to Derek; seeing his smile, hearing his voice, smelling his scent and feeling his body heat on the couch or when they snuggled close in bed. Vin realized, as he shared this intimate information, that his exhaustion was largely due to how he wasn't sleeping well in a bed that Derek no longer shared.

"He sounds very special," Alanna said.

"He was..." Vin didn't know how to say it.

"He was the love of your life," Alanna said.

"He was my life," Vin said.

"It must be very, very hard without him," Alanna said. "Very hard, and very lonely."

"It is," Vin said, dragging his shirtsleeve across his eyes for the dozenth time since he'd started telling her about Derek.

"We can help," Alanna said.

***

Vin tried several times to approach Seth, and finally managed it in another men's room meeting.

"I called that place on the business card last night. The Grieving Room," he said. "I guess I should thank you. At least... if they really can help me."

"When do you go in?"

"In four days."

"You got lucky. They often have longer waiting times."

"What are they gonna do?"

"They'll explain that better than I can," Seth told him.

"What did they do to you? I mean... did you notice any side effects? Are there drugs involved, or neural repatterning of some sort?"

Seth regarded him and Vin felt that cold, empty quality from him again. Why, Vin wondered again, was someone so detached helping him?

"I'll tell you what happened to me," Seth said. "There was a security seal failure near our apartment. Street people got into the city. My wife and daughter didn't survive. I did... and I killed two of them... but the other five beat me senseless."

"That was you?" Vin know the story. It had been used by the city administrators as a reason to enact a host of new and more restrictive policies, most of which had little to do with the threat of exiles getting into the city's inner sanctum.

"I missed a lot of work while I was healing, but they didn't put any blue or red marks on my record because they turned my loss into such a cause célèbre," Seth said. "Once I was healthy again, I went right back to work. No one said anything... no one offered condolences. No one took me aside to say they were sorry. I tried to act like nothing had happened, too, but inside I was broken. The medics couldn't heal that part of me. I struggled, the way you're struggling now... I had to seek refuge in the men's room, myself, when the grief and the rage were too much to control. And then I went to The Grieving Room. It's a place where you can feel those emotions, where you are not punished for expressing them... where you can release the poison of all that sorrow, all that rage, all that hate, and find peace again."

Vin looked at the floor, feeling his face flush with embarrassment for Seth's loss and pain. He was about to say the words "I'm sorry," but then he thought they would sound disingenuous, given the story Seth had just shared.

"Thanks again," Vin said instead, though he wasn't sure he'd actually thanked Seth before.

"Let me know how it goes," Seth replied.

***

Alanna wasn't an AI. At least, if the phone conversation Vin had had was with an AI, it was an AI patterned very closely on Alanna, who turned out to be not only a real person, but an overtly friendly and caring one.

There was a brief intake that was part medical history and part a repeat of what Vin had already told Alanna, though rounded out this time with a series of clinical questions that he answered as honestly as he could. Then Alanna escorted him from the reception area, along a warmly lit, short corridor, and to a polished wooden door.

Vin felt incongruously apprehensive and excited. He felt much the way he had when he'd visited a brothel at the age of seventeen, before he realized that women simply weren't for him – a realization that carried a degree of resignation, but no real fear. Homophobia was a private prejudice, and plenty of people indulged in it, but the law – and, more importantly, corporate culture – had no place for it. Prejudice, like other messy and wasteful human tendencies, was costly and unnecessary, an inefficiency that cold only obstruct commerce and profit.

Vin paid attention as Alanna began to speak. Her voice was hushed – even reverent.

"In The Grieving Room," Alanna explained, touching the door's exquisitely lacquered surface, "not only can you express your feelings... for the process to work, you must express those feelings. And not just express them, but feel them... feel them deeply, to the point that they blot out everything else. The more intensely you can access your feelings, the more therapeutic the process will be."

"I understand," Vin said, though he really didn't. But he was eager to see what she was talking about... eager for something for the first time in a long time.

Alanna opened the door. Beyond was a plain, round room, its curved wall bathed in a blue light from recessed fixtures. Th effect was otherworldly, but soothing. "Go ahead," she said.

"But what do I do?"

"Just what I said," Alanna told him. "Feel your feelings, Express them. Let them well up, let them overwhelm you. Let them go."

Vin frowned, not able to imagine what she meant.

"You'll see," she told him, patting him on the arm. "You'll be fine."

Vin stepped into the room and the door closed behind him. Once in the perfectly round space, he looked up to see the ceiling, too, was curved; it was a shallow dome, lit, as the wall was, with a blue glow from hidden illumination.

"What the hell am I supposed to do?" Vin wondered aloud. The room was empty; there were no pillows to scream into, as he had imagined there might be, and no punching bags to thrash.

A low rumble filled the room, and he felt the vibration in his chest.

A sound flooded the room, too – a sound like surf breaking.

Then movement caught his eye... not movement, exactly, Vin realized, but a kind of flicker or shadow. There was something passing through the room, moving around the circumference of the blue space...

No, there were many such somethigns: Shadows, ripples in the air... they were there, and yet they weren't; they were visible, and yet the eye could not pinpoint what they actually looked like. Somehow they registered, and yet they didn't seem to be there at all.

But they were there, and they seemed to gather around him, swarm around him... they seemed to orbit around him in a tight, quick circle...

Vin felt a moment of panic that was swiftly washed away by an upwelling of grief unlike anything he'd experienced since the night Derek died. It was agonizing; it was breathtaking; it was pure, primal, an eruption from the roots of his existence...

Vin wasn't sure what was happening. Was he screaming, sobbing?

All he knew, all he could register, was the immense pain of the moment...

The outpouring was beyond time. When it was over, Vin had no idea how long had passed. An hour? Two?

One minute? Two?

He was exhausted – more so than he had ever been. But he was also light, his body feeling like it might rebuke gravity and soar upwards at any moment.

Alanna had said he'd find relief. Or had that been Seth?

Someone had used that word. They were right: The sense of relief was an immense as his grief had been.

The door opened, and suddenly Alanna was there, shepherding him out of the round blue room and up the short corridor with its warm, honey-colored light, and then through the reception area.

"I can have someone see you home," she offered.

"No, I'm fine," Vin said, though he wasn't. He was so dazed and light-headed he wasn't entirely sure how he managed to find his way home, but he did, and then he collapsed on the bed... the empty bed he'd once shared with Derek. He fell into a slumber that was deeper than rest, deeper than dreams. It was almost death.

But he didn't die. He woke up six hours later, feeling curiously at peace. There as a silence in his mind that seemed disconcerting, as if a buzz or hum he'd long since stopped hearing had suddenly ceased.

Vin quickly showered and prepared for a new day. He selected a new shirt and jacket from his closet. He went to work.

Nothing hurt – not physically, and not emotionally. He marveled at the absence of pain, the lack of feeling. As he entered the office, Supervisor Florence raked him with a look. He looked back, coolly, unintimidated. Harsh and critical as her scrutiny always was, it didn't trigger a sense of dread in him as it always had before. Florence said nothing; she simply turned and went on her way.

Vin sat at his desk and got busy with the day's work.

Hours later, looking up, he saw Seth regarding him with vacant, unfeeling eyes. Vin nodded at him, signaling his freedom from pain and sorrow.

And joy. And anger. And lust, ambition, hope... love...

Vin found himself in the elevator with Seth at the end of the day. When the doors opened on the ground floor and everyone else dispersed, the two of them lingered for a moment outside the closing doors.

"They took away my grief," Vin said.

"Yes," Seth said. "That was the idea."

"But as the day went on I realized they took all my feelings. All of them."

"Yes. No more anxiety, no more fear, no more fury," Seth told him. "You will experience physical hungers for food, movement, even sex. But the emotions are gone. It's liberating."

"I feel dead inside," Vin said.

"Does that bother you?"

"No," Vin said. "Intellectually, yes, But not emotionally, no."

"Your intellectual expectation of emotional sensation is a habit," Seth said. "It will fall away, and you will realize how much better off you are."

Vin considered that. Then he asked, "What were they?"

"The beings in the room with you?" Seth asked. "I don't know. Spirits, maybe."

"I don't believe in evil spirits," Vin said. "That's irrational."

"Aliens, perhaps. Entities."

"But what sort of entities? From where?"

"Here, maybe," Seth suggested. "Some form of life that has adapted to the ecological niche we have created, in which strong emotions are a hazard instead of a benefit."

Vin considered that in turn. Then he asked, "Will I feel again?"

"No. They have devoured your feelings."

"By consuming some part of my brain? Or... or my soul?"

"Isn't the idea of a soul irrational?" Seth asked.

"Yes, I suppose I should release such inconsistencies and paradoxes, as well," Vin said.

Seth began to turn away. Then he turned back to Vin. "Did she give you some cards to pass along to others in need of The Grieving Room?" he asked.

Unsure, Vin reached into his jacket pocket. A small stack of cards – smooth, sharp-edged and crips at the corners – met his grazing fingertips. He pulled the cards out and showed them to Seth.

"That's good. Keep the cards with you. Offer them to others in need," Seth said.

"You make it sound like they're doing a service," Vin said.

"They are," Seth said.

"No, they aren't. They're simply feeding themselves on us, much as the Owners do," Vin said.
"Feeding on the dying body of a civilization... a world... that has crippled and consumed itself in other ways. They are simply scavenging on what's left over."

"Perhaps," Seth said. "But they have also delivered a mercy to us. We no longer have to suffer."

Seth walked away. Vin headed toward the transit landing for the train that would take him home.

Is this lack of suffering also a suffering in itself? Vin wondered with crisp, precise thoughts. He had always been a crisp, precise person. That was what made him so good with numbers.

But he had once been more than that, too. He wasn't sure he still was.

Is this vacancy and loss of inner life a loss? Or is it, as Seth suggests, a blessing?

Waiting for his train, Vin reflected on the world around him and wondered it if even mattered.

Next week we contemplate a mural that captures and communicates music. But not just any music: This is a song of revolution – a dirge for a crumbling fascist government – and an ode to freedom. The problem is that only special people can look at the colors and shapes and hear the tune...