Banned From Existence

You have been banned from existence.

I held the note in my hand and stared at it. If I concentrated hard enough, it might change into something else. More words might appear on the page. They might explain what was going on. An answer to the burning question on my mind,

“Where am I?”

My question echoed around me, telling me that the eternal whiteness around me was not infinite. Something existed somewhere for the sound to bounce off of and return, though as the echoes faded it dawned on me that whatever this place was, it went on for a long, long distance.

Still, an echo meant it was not infinite, no matter how it looked staring out into whiteness.

The note remained unchanged. I looked down at it again and then around me into the whiteness. No amount of staring and concentration could change anything. The white was white. The note was six words long.

A silly song played over and over in my head.

Wherever I was, it was not Atlanta. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the city around me. I was standing at Five Points station, looking across the street at the stairs that led down into Underground Atlanta. A man stood on a wooden box, shouting as he tried to hand little folded flyers from his church to students and business people who walked past, ignoring his street sermon.

I could hear his voice over the rush of cars and din of other voices. “You’re going to Hell if you don’t repent. Jesus loves you but you have to take that love into your heart. Can you take his love?”

Everything felt real. I could feel the sun on my arms and smell the stale scent of urine drifting up from the station. I opened my eyes, expecting to be standing there again, and found myself still in a sea of white, holding a note in my hands.

“You can’t banish me from existence,” I said into the white nothingness. “Existence echoed around for a while, wandering further and further away until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

As real as the street felt when my eyes were closed, this was real here. I felt no heat of the sun. I smelled no urine. I heard no cacophony of voices and a judgemental street preacher vying for attention and converts. It was just me and this stupid note that made no sense.

How can you be banished from existence? More to the point, how could I be banished from existence and still have a me to be standing here in this white whatever? If I was banished from existence, then I wouldn’t have me anymore to stand anywhere. There would be no me to think or try to feel or will myself back into the world.

I would not be conscious of any of this at all. I would simply cease to be and the world would continue without me.

“Oh, that’s an idea.” I was only half-conscious of saying the words out loud. What if I didn’t exist anymore and what I thought was me “is just an echo from the world, acknowledging that I don’t exist anymore?”

That didn’t make much sense either.

Abraham Lincoln was not in the world anymore, but he still existed. He had been born, lived, and died. History recorded him. When John Wilkes Booth shot him in the theatre, he did not stop existing. He just died.

If I had been banned from existence, why would the world be reacting to that? If I was banned from existence, that meant that I would never have existed at all. I would never have been born. I would never have gone to high school. I would never have graduated and gone to college.

I would never have met Dean.

Thinking about it, that last would not have been so bad. Never meeting Dean would mean that I would never have received that hateful message on my phone – a device that was gone now.

Looking down at myself, I seemed to be wearing a white jumpsuit, white sox, and white shoes. The color so closely matched my surroundings that when I looked away, I lost sight of myself in my peripheral vision. It did not help that I had no shadow cast around or below me.

That made me curious about how I was able to see at all. The light had to come from somewhere to bounce off my body and enter my eye, thus enabling vision. Cast light would mean a cast shadow since I was standing on solid … solid something. I don’t know if I could consider it ground or floor.

I knelt to touch it and felt …

It was the strangest thing. I stood back up and jumped. I felt my feet leave the surface. My bodyweight pulled downward and when gravity took hold of me, my breasts bounced up, my hair trailed upward, and my feet touched the surface again.

Something was below me.

I knelt down again and reached my hand down to touch it. I felt my hand stop but felt nothing there. I stood on ground that I could not actually touch. It was like my hand just stopped and when I tapped my fingers, I just tapped them on air that stopped them at a specific point, letting them go no further, but offering no sensation.

Even the stopping was just sensation of action, not one of touch.

Nothing was below me, but I stood there anyway.

I sat down and stared off into the whiteness.

********

I decided that I had been sitting there for about three hours, pondering what existence meant. I had to choose an arbitrary amount of time because without my phone, I had no way to know how much time had passed. Three hours seemed like a good arbitrary number and measure, though.

It was more than a little time but less than too much. It was the length of three 45-minute class times plus a little time in between. That seemed fine enough to me and so I decided it was good.

Three hours had passed.

In that time, I reached three conclusions.

1. I still existed.
2. I was not insane.
3. Existence was not defined by either me or the world, but was instead a relative thing. I always existed relative to myself, but to everything else, I was no longer and perhaps had never been there.

I doubted that I had never existed in everything else. That idea seemed to be … I could not quite put my finger on why that felt wrong. I looked at the note again and hoped maybe, after three hours of pondering, that it might say something else.

Instead, it said the same words, You have been banned from Existence.

Dean’s message had been worse. I never loved you. You were never really a part of my world.

I had sent him back a message just as hateful. Fuck you, then. I wish your world never existed.

“Maybe he did love me.” I frowned as “love me” echoed away. It seemed like a random thought, almost romantic. What if Dean really did love me. What if I was not just a part of his world, but I was his world.

When I wished it out of existence, if that wish had anything to it, then I could have ended up here. That would have been poetic justice, wouldn’t it. I cheat on my boyfriend with his best friend, get petulant that he has the gall to be mad at me for it, and wish myself out of existence when I tell him to fuck off.

If that were the case, then all of this could be some strange cosmic play, meant to teach me a Platonic lesson. I could learn to value the true love before me and realize that I would do anything, pay any price, to have it back. If I believed in that lesson hard enough, then maybe I could close my eyes and open them again. I would be standing outside of Five Points Station, across the street from Underground Atlanta. I would look down at my phone and instead of telling him to fuck off, the message I sent would say, I’m so sorry. I don’t deserve you or your forgiveness. I wish I could take it all back.

It was a nice thought. It was a romantic thought.

It was bullshit.

The thing was, I didn’t regret sleeping with Ray. It was fun. He was an attentive lover, in bed at least. That was more than I could say for Dean, who thought sex was getting on top of me and thrusting a few times until he came.

I mean, technically, that’s what sex was – that’s what intercourse was anyway.

Truth be told, not that truth mattered to a white nothingness, I didn’t sleep with Ray because I thought he would be a better lover. I didn’t even sleep with Ray because I liked him.

I slept with Ray because Dean was a dick.

A few weeks ago I went to a party with some friends of mine. It was fun. I drank and hung out with people and just had fun. Dean didn’t go because he wasn’t invited to go and I’m not under any obligation to take him to a party he’s not explicitly invited to. It would have been rude anyway. It was not an open party.

Dean was pissed and fine, I get why. He felt left out. He sulked for several days and then got it into his head that I went to the party without him because I was going to fuck someone at the party.

That would have been fine except for the part where we’re hanging out in the student center – well, I’m hanging out in the student center playing spades with some other students and Dean trotted up, angry because I hadn’t answered his text message. I hadn’t seen it yet because, well, I was in the middle of a spades game.

He took that moment to announce to everyone in the student center that not only did I have sex with other people at that party, but I had had sex with the guys I was playing spades with at the party.

This was embarrassing but it was also kind of funny.

I didn’t find any of them particularly attractive. They were fun to hang out and play cards with, but they were not sex material. They were just the guys. In the student center. That I played spades with.

But they were also black.

Dean hated that I had dated black guys in the past. He was hung up on the myth that black men are more endowed, shall we say. It was an insecurity that came up more than a few times.

Honestly, I had dated three black guys in the past. I only had sex with one of them. One I dated when I was thirteen and was into guys and kissing them, but not really into the idea of doing anything else with them. The second I only went on two dates with and we just never seemed to gel enough for me to do anything else.

So that was the first reason it was funny.

The second reason it was funny was that one of the guys, Jerome, was there with his girlfriend, who was at that moment bouncing their one-year-old son on her knee.

Now, I don’t know if you have ever been a white boy who makes a black woman mad before. I’ve been a white woman making a black woman mad and I can tell you, it’s not an experience I would ever want to repeat. I don’t care how sarcastic and clever you think you are. You do not cut someone down the way a black woman will cut you down if you are a white woman who pisses her off.

I dropped my cards fast because Yvonne’s kid was suddenly in my hands. He blinked a moment and then bounced, just accepting that the white girl was going to play with him now. Then Yvonne was on her feet, standing up on her tiptoes so that she could push herself up into Dean’s face. Her shoulders and upper body moved in time with her anger as she punctuated her words with her finger jabbing into Dean’s shoulder.

“Don’t you dare stand here and say that MY Jerome would fuck some pasty white bitch behind my back.”

I was caught between hiding my laughter and the rising embarrassment I felt as everyone in the student center lounge had been looking at us and now understood that I was, indeed, the one Dean had come in to accuse of sleeping with three men at a party the week before.

Yvonne continued lacing into him until he finally pulled himself away and rushed out in a huff, pushing past a new set of students who came into the hushed lounge, looking confused and wondering what they had missed.

When Yvonne sat down, I was afraid her anger was going to turn to me. Instead, she held out her hands for her son. I handed him over and picked up the cards that I had dropped, only the two of hearts ended up turning up in the drop.

“I can’t believe that motherfucker coming up in here like that,” Yvonne said. “You should fuck someone else, just to show him you’re your own woman.”

I laughed. I knew Yvonne was joking and trying to ease my sense of fear and embarrassment. She was all about fidelity in relationships, which was why she had gone off on Dean the way she had. By accusing me of sleeping with her boyfriend, Dean had suggested that Yvonne did not know how to keep him in line.

My embarrassment was short-lived, but Dean could not come into the lounge if I was there playing spades without the guys – and it did not have to be Jerome and the others who had been there that day – ribbing him about how great I was in bed. Word had gotten around to the whole game crowd.

After the third day of it, Dean stopped coming in.

Even though I knew that Yvonne had been joking that day, I had decided that I would follow her advice anyway, just not with her boyfriend or his buddies.

I opened my eyes again to the whiteness around me. I expected nothing less. Dean had been the love of my life for a while, but his insecurities and jealousies had worn on me. To say I didn’t have the energy to deal with them was a lie. I had the energy. I lacked the desire and motivation.

All he gave me was his insecurities and jealousies. They were tiring, but not draining. They were also unpleasant and made me not want to keep giving anything positive back to him.

So, no, I was not in this place because of how I had hurt him and broken his heart. Whatever this place was, whatever reason I had been banished from reality to here for, they had nothing to do with him.

“Maybe there’s a way out of here.” I began walking in the direction I was facing. It seemed straight enough, but I had no reference point to know if I was moving diagonally or if I was beginning to curve as I walked. I did not even know where I was. Once I had moved, the place I once occupied was just more white in the sea of white.

“I need a better metaphor.”

I sighed. This was boring and aggravating. I had no idea why I was here, who had put me here, or what I was supposed to do about it. What caused someone to get banned from existence anyway?

The worst thing I had ever done was to cheat on Dean with his best friend.

Well …

Anyway, no one banned you from existence for cheating on your boyfriend. At worst, you got snubbed by some of your friends. Maybe people whispered behind your

back, though I doubted that would happen at college. More likely, our mutual friends would stop speaking to me and one or two of my friends would decide to dump me to take his side.

Georgia State was not the kind of school that fostered a rumor-mill atmosphere, not the kind I had been used to in high school anyway. Sure, it had its cliques, but the student body was far too diverse for the kind of cohesion produced within high school hierarchies.

Being banned from existence was a cosmic thing. You had to do something cosmically significant for that to happen.

Well, I supposed one had to.

It made sense that one had to.

If you could just randomly be banned from existence for the smallest infraction, or no infraction, that would be a pretty chaotic world. Action and reaction had to be proportional to keep things together. You had to be able to count on certain outcomes to predict and plan.

A universe where you could cut someone off in traffic and God might call lightning down from Heaven onto you for it was the kind of universe where the stock markets collapsed daily. Order didn’t make the world go around.

Order was the world going around.

What things had I done that had cosmic significance?

The answer to that question was a resounding nothing.

Weird things never happened around me, no weirder than what happened around other people anyway. Once I made Bloody Mary appear in a mirror.

Well, she was supposed to be Bloody Mary. When I was eleven years old at a sleepover in a house I had only been to a couple of times, the red image in the mirror certainly looked like a bloody ghost and not my reflection, seen through eyes that saw shades of red after spending several minutes upside down.

When I got older, I doubted that she was a ghost. Back then, however, I only saw the bloody face in the mirror and an arm that rose when my own was still. I screamed and the next thing I remember was a young Dean, rocking me while his sister and my other friends laughed.

That was when he and I became friends. I stayed friends with his sister too, but he and I had bonded then. We had no idea, him thirteen, and me eleven, that anything would come of that friendship. He dated other girls. I dated other guys. When we weren’t dating people, we commiserated about how it sucked that we couldn’t find anyone.

We had no idea what was waiting for us when we started college.

He started a year ahead of me. I had tested a year ahead in middle school and started high school early, leaving his sister and my other friends behind and making new ones.

“If it wasn’t for him being insecure, jealous, and possessive, it would have been perfect,” I said to the whiteness as I continued to walk.

His insecurity, jealousy, and possessiveness weren’t the only things wrong with the relationship, though. When he and I got together, I had had sex with a couple of guys. I had an idea of the things that I liked and a good idea of the things that I didn’t. Dean didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t that he was a bad lover or an uncaring boyfriend. It was more like – his pleasure was all that mattered.

If he got me off, it was to boost his ego or give him that edge to help him get off. It was kind of annoying, like my pleasure was just for his benefit.

Our whole relationship was like that. What I wanted only mattered when it boosted him in some way. If fulfilling something made him feel good, he cared about doing it. If it didn’t, then he didn’t notice. This happened with big things, like emotional intimacy and little things like where we went to eat dinner.

Even if something was supposed to be about me, it was still somehow about him.

Like – okay. I had this restaurant that I had always wanted to go to. It was a small fondue restaurant in Midtown Atlanta. Dean knew that I wanted to go to it because I had talked about wanting to go since I was in middle school. When I turned twenty-one, a place like that would have been the perfect place to take me, right? I had always wanted to go and had never been able to and I’d finally be old enough to legally enjoy the fancy wines they served.

So the week leading up to my birthday he tells me how he’s going to take me out to the perfect restaurant. I’m going to love it so much. He’s so excited to take me. I’m thinking that it is going to be this place.

How could it not be this place?

He took me to this new Asian-Latin American fusion restaurant that had opened up near Little Five Points. “Think about that a moment. It was a restaurant that served food that was a blend of Asian and Latin American cuisine. What kind of Asian food? Which country? What kind of Latin American cuisine?”

I looked around at the whiteness, waiting for it to answer.

“You’re asking the wrong question. The right question is ‘was it good’, and the answer is a resounding ‘no!’”

He took me because when he heard it was opening, he was curious what the food would be like and was looking for a special occasion to take me to it.

My twenty-first birthday dinner was an avenue for sating his curiosity. He could have waited for any other time. Hell, he could have waited three weeks and taken me on our anniversary. For that matter, he could have taken me to the fondue restaurant on our anniversary.

Instead, he took me to yet another restaurant he had heard about and wanted to try.

It would have been a little better if the places he insisted on taking me were places I was excited about too. I liked Mexican food, but there were foods I liked better. I enjoyed sushi and Japanese hibachi, but found most other Asian fare to be … Well, Chinese food bored me. I never really got into Korean. Vietnamese was okay, but really I only enjoyed the soup.

I had found a place that served authentic Mongolian food once. It was really good, rich, and flavorful foods that were filling. I asked Dean a few times if he would take me – I had gone there with friends – and he would always take me for Chinese or Korean food instead.

After a while, I stopped asking. It was easier and less frustrating than getting my hopes up only to have them dashed by this thoughtlessness.

My relationship with Dean and its ending was no act of cosmic horror. They were just what happened when people who were friends got into a relationship but did not know how to move the familiarity of friendship onto something else. As horrible as I made Dean sound, he wasn’t a bad person.

I guess he just took for granted that I would like all the things he liked because we had been close friends for so long.

Cheating on Dean had been the worst thing that I had ever done, yes. It still was not cosmically significant.

“What if I did wish the world out of existence?” The word existence echoed off, slowly fading away as it did.

Wishing the world out of existence was cosmically significant. That was the kind of thing that I could see someone getting whisked out of reality, shunted over into a dimension of pure whiteness, and being given a note stating they had been banned from reality.

That made sense except for one key thing.

The person had to have the power to make the wish come true.

We were back to proportions and what order was once again. I was not special. I did not have the kind of power that could wish entire worlds out of existence. That was not what I was or had ever been at any point in my life.

Bloody Mary was the weirdest thing to ever happen to me and I’ve never been convinced it was real. It was more likely just an optical illusion and my fear in a dark bathroom.

I was just a girl. At the end of the day, I only had the power to affect one world, my own personal one. I could affect the ones that touched mine, but only tangentially. Sure, I broke Dean’s heart, but I did not destroy his world. It would go on, with or without me in it.

I certainly could not wish the entire world out of existence.

So I was back to square one and wondering why I was here and what I was supposed to do about it.

As I walked, something strange happened.

My foot went down further than the other foot did. I held out my arms and tried to catch my balance, but to no avail. I fell forward, knocking my breath out against nothing as my ankle twisted.

I sat rubbing my ankle with one hand and I held the other over the space of nothing that was not nothing. A gentle breeze came up from what I deemed to be a hole in the nothing, even though there was no visible change in the nothingness below me.

I say it was a breeze, but really, it was more like a draft. I don’t even know if that was right. Maybe it was the existence of air where there was no evidence of existence around it. Whatever it was, it was slight but present. It also persisted. I moved my hand away and back, and it was still there.

A crack had formed in this unreality place.

My ankle started feeling better. I focused my attention on the hole, feeling as best I could around the edges of the nothingness. There was no surface below me, that is when I pushed downward or focused on what I was sitting on, I could feel nothing there. I just was unable to push down – except where I felt air. There, I could push my hand down until my body stopped me.

Finding the edges of the nothingness around this hole was a strange kind of exercise. You have this concept of stuff, that you can see it and touch it. I had nothing there and had to somehow feel its edges. I had no sensation to guide me, only the stopping of my hand as I felt around the air.

As I acclimated to a circle that was not there around air that most certainly was, a thought occurred to me. What if I only had the conception of ground or surface beneath me because I thought I should have it. I was not, as far as I could tell, freefalling in a nothingness. So it stood to reason that I had to be standing on something, even if I could not see it.

What if that was not the case at all? What if what I stood on and what my hand was stopped by was nothing more than my concept of why I should be standing and not falling?

It seemed like a farfetched idea, but as I felt around the presence of the air, I noticed that my hands moved around a larger area. The air was growing and within it the hole in this unreality place. I continued to focus on the idea of no ground at all as my hands moved out wider and wider.

When it was a little bigger than my shoulder span in diameter, I leaned forward to peek through. I had no sense of falling, but I could hear noises – car horns, voices of people. I could also smell exhaust and the stale scent of urine. I pulled myself through the air, pushing up until I could pull my legs out of the white and into …

I stood at Five Points, outside of the station with the stairs down to Underground Atlanta across the street in front of me. People moved past me, none of them noticing me. Then I saw him, his black hair blowing over his brows as he left the station and emerged onto the street. Dean looked at me – and then past me.

No, he looked through me. His expression remained unchanged as his eyes passed mine and he turned to walk to the school. He passed me, unflinching at my presence, and turned at the corner to make his way on to class.

It was as if I weren’t even there.

I tested the boundaries, moving around so that people had to notice me. If I walked in someone’s path, they simply shifted wordlessly. No one paid attention when I waved my hand. I even moved so that a man could run into me or other people. He moved, almost knocking a woman down as he did so.

I was clearly here, as people responded to the reality of my presence. If I were in their way, they moved. I was a physical barrier, but they otherwise did not acknowledge me at all.

It was – it was like the floor of the unreality place. I was walking around. Something stopped my feet as I placed them down. If I tried to interact with that surface, however, I felt nothing at all.

Here, I was that surface and no one even tried.

I frowned and walked around, ignoring the street preacher as he went on about demons in our midst. As the disappointment I felt at the prospect of being eternally ignored faded, I began to take notice of things.

First, the world just plain looked off. The colors were too bright and the details were too vivid. I walked across the street and down the stairs to the entrance of Underground. The brick wall seemed particularly vivid. I moved closer. Where once I would have only seen the hues of maroon fading in and out, now I saw exactly how porous the stone was. Everything had this fine level of detail. Metal was no longer the silvery hue that lightened slightly where light met it. Instead, it was vibrant, reflecting light. Some metal even reflected my image.

The minutia of it all had me enthralled. I walked into a shop just to look at the trinkets inside. I picked up a wooden doll and studied the grain of the wood under its clear finish. I looked at the clothes and could see the pattern of the weave – not the pattern on the design, but the weave pattern of the thread that made the outfit.

I had no money for food, but I was curious about how it might taste. I made my way to the food court and, just as I hoped, people were out in front of the different food stands, holding out trays of samples. The competing smells assaulted my senses. I could smell the bright aroma of Cajun spices and the dark tang of food cooked in soy sauce.

As I walked past, I took a sample of chicken from one vendor. The breading was pocked and marked with spices. I took a bite and almost had to spit it out. The food was good, but the flavor was overwhelming. The warm, savory breading mixed with the pop of the pepper, the pinching salt, the bright bouquet of other spices I could not identify attacked me all at once. I looked at the remainder of the chicken on the toothpick and tilted my head.

The meat threaded, pulling off in small tendrils where I had bitten the sample. It reminded me of woodgrain. Though I was still hungry, the boldness of the flavor had chased away my appetite and will to eat.

I had never experienced the world this way before. I looked at the people around me. Everyone was so … different. Only a few people had ever stood out to me in my life, Dean most prominently. Jerome and Yvonne were unique but most of the other spades crew were just people.

Now, everyone was unique. Brown hair had shades, hues, and interesting highlights. Blonde hair was … well, I had always seen blonde hair as something a little yellow or white. Now it varied from almost platinum to something lighter than brown. Even red hair had alternatives to the deep auburn that I was used to.

Reality had overwhelmed me with its level of detail and depth of sensation. I started to wonder if I had been banned not for its safety, but my own. Had the world always been like this so – so vivid? How had I missed this?

I shook my head and found a bench to sit down on. I wanted to find my way back to the white place. I wanted to get away from this full, loud, vibrant world. Everything seemed to press in on me and I felt as though I were suffocating. Why had I come back? Did I miss the world? Did I miss my friends?

Did I come back for Dean?

That question popped me out of my maddening stupor. I looked up and watched people as they passed by. So much detail in their clothing and the way they walked. No two people had the same gait. Voices were unique, each standing out among the din of noise if I concentrated.

After a little while, the uniqueness began to coalesce into something more objective. I stopped having to count each person and started to think of them once again as a crowd, as passersby. I could see the minute details if I concentrated, but I stopped looking compulsively.

The world was still so different and so much more alive but I could cope now.

I stood up and made my way back out into the daylight. I had only been down in the underground for a little while, perhaps an hour or two. If I made my way to the Student Center, I could probably catch a few hands of spades. Then I might go onto my afternoon class, or I could just head back to my dorm.

The walk over seemed to take forever. I could count the steps to walk from Five Points over to the campus, where before the walk seemed more like floating along. I finally made it to the overpass and crossed under it so that I could enter the building and make my way up to the familiar room outside of the university’s food court.

As I stepped into the doorway of the student lounge, I paused and my breath caught in my throat. Sitting there in one of the chairs pulled around one of the tables was … well, she was me. She had my brown hair that reached down her back. Her blue eyes were brighter than mine but were unmistakable inside of the soft features of her face. She laughed as she laid down a card and Jerome, who sat next to her, groaned. She had slipped an Ace of Diamonds under his Two of Spades, forcing him to take the trick.

Had he gone nil and she screwed him, or had she and he failed to?

My heart raced. What would happen if she saw me? What would the world be like if we recognized each other?

“Excuse me. Can you please move so the rest of us can get in?”

I turned around but the young woman with the shrill voice was not speaking to me. She was talking to the young man who stood directly behind me, just in front of the door and unmoving, as I blocked his path.

He rolled his eyes as he turned around. “Can you please be patient?”

“You’re just standing there like a damned fool.”

I stopped paying attention to the argument and moved into the lounge. I didn’t have to worry about me seeing me because no one could see me. I lingered over the game, watching me play with my friends, and smiled. I was pretty good at the game. Today, I was paired with Yvonne and from the look of things, we were running the game.

That was good. I always enjoyed playing with her – except that I was not playing with her. Someone else was. She had my face and my voice. She had my little catchphrases that I would lift from other people and make my own.

Everything about her was a mimic of me except for one key difference – she was not me at all. She was something else, someone else. I wanted to grab her, pull her up, and ask her how she dared to sit here with my friends and play in my spot. I was the token white girl for the spades game, not her.

The girl who was me and not me looked up and grew pale. Jerome looked over at the door and Yvonne craned her head around. Stevie ignored it all, looking at his hand carefully. I looked up and saw Dean walk in. His eyes met mine, but not mine. They met hers. Then he looked away quickly and made his way over to the opposite side of the lounge.

“You could always make up with him,” Stevie said.

I looked down. Both of my jaws dropped slightly. Stevie did pay attention to stuff after all.

“My bitch deserves better than that white toast,” Yvonne said.

“Well, I did sleep with his best friend.” My voice sounded strange coming from someone else. The tenor was brighter and lighter than it sounded when I spoke with that voice.

“Dean’s also a possessive asshole who needs to grow up,” Jerome said. “Ignore him and have fun trouncing me and Stevie.”

The me-not-me laughed and turned her attention back to the game.

I left them and walked over to Dean so that I could look over his shoulder. He had his laptop out now and was typing away. It looked like a paper and as had always happened when looking at his homework, I grew bored.

Seeing me here, seeing him here, seeing my friends enjoying the afternoon with a me who was not me … it all just weighed on me. I could go to my dorm, but I realized I would not be able to get in. I didn’t have my keys and since no one could see me, no one would be able to help me get in.

What if I did get in anyway? What would that matter?

I was … I was …

I walked back out of the lounge and down the stairs. I emerged under the overpass and walked back towards Five Points. I had no idea what to do or where to go. I could try to get back to the white place, but how? I wasn’t even sure just how I had gotten here. There was that hole of something in nothing, but what was that actually?

Had I managed to pull myself through it or did I fall into it?

Was I even here?

“I was wondering when you were going to come back.”

I ignored the voice, no longer interested in who people were addressing when they spoke near me.

“Huh. I never knew demons to be rude. Usually, you’re nice so you can corrupt people.”

I turned around. The street preacher was no longer on his podium. He had it turned over as he packed pamphlets into it.

“You can see me?” I asked and looked around again, just to make sure that he wasn’t talking to someone else.

Sure, no one would see the embarrassment of me talking to someone who wasn’t talking to me, but I would know about it. I would feel it.

“Yep.” His southern accent drew out the world slightly. “I don’t suppose you have a couple of dollars you’d like to toss at a man of God to help him get a bite to eat.”

“You just called me a demon,” I said. “Why would I give you anything?”

Yes, it was a relief that someone could see me, but that didn’t mean I liked him being rude about it.

The preacher laughed. “Well, that’s what you are. Doesn’t mean you’re not a nice person. You have to be nice to corrupt people. No one likes following mean people.”

“You haven’t been on YouTube,” I said.

The preacher shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t care much for the Internet, no. I do care for gyros, though, and wouldn’t mind one from the restaurant around the corner.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said. “I don’t think it would matter if I did. People can’t see me, except you, and I doubt they’d see anything I tried to hand them.”

“Huh.” The preacher laughed. “Well, alright then. I’ll treat.”

With that, he pulled panels up from the sides of his box and folded them over, closing it and latching it. He picked it up like a suitcase and started walking, waving for me to follow him.

I was curious now. I had always spent my days ignoring the street preacher or mocking him to my friends when I was out of earshot of him. Now he was about to feed me food and kept calling me …

“Hey,” I called ahead as I caught up to him. “If you think I’m a demon, why are you being so nice to me?”

“Demons are still God’s creatures. I might preach fire and brimstone and how the gays are corrupting our world but I’d still be nice to them if they stopped to talk to me. Just because I don’t believe in their ways, or yours, doesn’t mean I have to be mean. Besides, it’s what matters to God.”

I shook my head and we crossed the street. “I don’t understand.”

The preacher laughed again. “God doesn’t care about how we treat people we like. Of course, we’re going to be nice to them. We like them. What matters, what he cares about, is how we treat the people we don’t like. Do you think the Samaritan liked the Jewish man he helped on the side of the road? Hells no. Jews were awful to the Samaritans. They’d been fighting each other for generations. But he was nice to him because that’s what you did for people you despised. That was God’s goodness in you.”

I felt both warmth and a cold pang of regret talking to him like this. If this was what he had been saying on his pedestal every day I walked past him, I think I would have taken one of his pamphlets. Hell, I would have taken all of them and passed them around to everyone I knew.

This was beautiful. This was what Christianity was supposed to be, treating people with kindness and respect no matter what you thought of them. It was supposed to be about doing the most good in the world, not talking about how people not you were corrupting the world around you.

“Why don’t you talk like this on the pedestal?”

We stopped at the Greek restaurant and I followed him inside. He did not answer me. Instead, he ordered two gyros and two sodas. The woman wordlessly took his payment and when the food was ready, I followed him to a table in the furthest corner away from the door.

“Sorry,” he said as we sat down. “I try not to talk to things people can’t see when I’m trying to get food. It makes them uncomfortable. So, what did you ask me again?”

“All that stuff about being good even to people you don’t like, why don’t you talk like that when you’re preaching? It was beautiful.”

The preacher took a bite of his gyro and I wondered if he was thinking about the question or was just hungry. I picked mine up and ate it. I loved gyros but this one was amazing. Somehow this food was less violent than what I had tried in Underground. I don’t know if it was the cool of the Ziki sauce or the mellowness of the lamb. I found even with the vibrant flavor that I could still eat it and rediscovered just how hungry I was.

“People don’t like hearing it,” he said after three bites of his gyro. “They say they do, usually just like you did. I tried preaching like that, though, and people stopped showing up. People don’t want to feel good about themselves. They want to feel better than other people. It’s sad and I hate it, but if I can still reach them with the gospel through talking down on others, well, it’s worth it to save their souls.”

“I still think it would be better if you were nicer on your podium,” I said and took another bite of food.

The preacher laughed. “So you know my story, what’s important of it. What’s your story? What kind of demon are you and why have you decided to manifest in my city today?”

His city?

“I’m not a demon,” I said. “I’m a girl.”

I looked up at him.

The preacher sat there, studying me carefully. “Girls are ignored sometimes, but not the pretty ones. They’re certainly not unseen. You’re a demon, I just can’t figure what kind.”

Maybe I was a demon.

“Earlier today,” I paused, “Well, I think it was earlier today, I was texting my ex-boyfriend. We broke up because …” Did I want to tell him what I had done? Did it matter? “We broke up because I had sex with his best friend. Anyway, I told him off and the next thing I knew, I was in this place that was just white. No one else was there, and I had a note that said I’d been banned from existence. I don’t know how long I was there. I walked around and fell and found a way back here but the world looks different.”

He sat back and crossed his arms. “Different how?”

“Everything is so much more detailed. Everyone looks different from everyone instead of just people I know looking different. And don’t get me started on the food.” I looked down at the remains of my Gyro. “This is the first thing I’ve been able to eat since I got back.”

“You might not be from here,” he said. “Maybe you’re a demon from Purgatory.”

“I thought demons were from Hell.”

The preacher did not answer me and I decided not to challenge him further on theology. He would probably know better than me where demons were from. “So you’re a human girl then?”

“Yes.” I nodded emphatically.

“What’s your first memory?”

I laughed. “Playing Bloody Mary at my friend’s slumber party and Dean comforting me after I freaked myself out.” Now I sat back and folded my arms in satisfaction. Childhood memory played. Game, set, match.

“Bloody Mary, huh? So you were what, twelve?”

“Eleven,” I corrected him. I felt confident and yet, something in the pit of my stomach stirred. He did not seem phased by my answer at all.

“So your first memory is you at eleven? Not walking. Not playing with a dog for the first time. Not kindergarten graduation. Not stealing a kiss in the schoolyard when you were seven. Who is Dean?”

“My ex.” That thing in the pit of my stomach grew into something dark and icky. As it moved there, it left me feeling unsettled and cold.

“You don’t have to rattle them off,” he said. “How many memories don’t involve Dean?”

I had plenty of memories that didn’t involve Dean. I had the spades crew that I played cards with. There was, of course, sex with Dean’s friend. There were my three black boyfriends. I also had plenty of memories of hanging out with Dean’s sister.

I started to open my mouth to speak and stopped. I had lots of memories that he was not in but I couldn’t think of a memory that did not involve him at least tangentially. If it was not something in response to him, it was something that bothered him or stressed him in some way.

“Is it possible,” the preacher said, “that you’re a demon sent here to torment this young man? Maybe he’s on a path Satan wants to lure him away from.”

My heart sank and I wondered if he was right. Maybe my banishment had not been from my life but from some other demonic service I had done before being summoned up for this. The white place might have been my training place.

Only …

“How can I corrupt him if he can’t see me?” I asked.

The preacher frowned. “I’ve always wondered that about demons.”

The luster of the preacher man who could see me faded with that statement. He was not some mythical human with supernatural powers. He was just unhinged. He had enough grip to keep himself functional and allow himself to operate in the world – like not talking to things others could not see in front of people. Whatever I was, his fractured mind let him see me.

Because you’re not real.

That was not my thought. I looked around, but the only people I saw besides the preacher were one or two other people, their attentions focused on food and phones.

“I need to go. Thank you again for the food.”

I stood up and rushed out before the preacher could stop me. On the street, the cars were too loud and the crosswalk signal too high-pitched and glaring. Birds in the park across the street mimicked it, causing a cacophony that made me want to scream.

You’re not real!

I heard the voice again. It sounded angry and seemed to come not from my head, but all around me. I looked around and then up. In the sky, I saw a slit open, like an incision from a scalpel. Something white seemed to leak around it and I turned, running down the sidewalk.

A car honked as its driver slammed his breaks, narrowly missing me. He could not see me, but he knew instinctively that I was there. Others had to know too.

Dean had to know.

The voice boomed around me so loud that I saw other people look around and up at the sky.

“Is there a storm?” a woman asked as I dashed past.

“No clouds,” her friend commented, the rest of her statement not making it to my ears.

Dean had an English class right now. I dashed into the classroom building and took the stairs in twos. If I could find him, I could stand there in front of him until he was forced to see me. I could make him acknowledge me.

Then I would be real.

Not real! The voice sounded almost like thunder through the stone walls of the building. I knew, though, that it would find a way to rip inside.

Then the whiteness would come for me. It would take me back to the place I had been banished to.

“Just close the door behind you,” Professor Miller walked out of the last classroom. He was Dean’s English teacher. I brushed past him and stopped in the doorway as Dean picked up his books.

He walked to the door and stopped. His eyes looked through me and he sighed as he just stood there.

“Dean, can you hear me?” I tried to meet his eyes, but they would not focus on mine.

He did not answer me. I stood on my toes, hoping height would make my case.

Dean stepped forward and stopped. He scratched the back of his head and frowned. His eyes darkened and focused on my space for a brief second before looking past me again.

“Dean please,” I said.

The voice outside thundered again. Not real! I could feel it ripping at the stone of the building. It would be in soon.

What would happen to me?

“I need you, Dean,” I said. “I’m going to die if you don’t look at me and acknowledge that I’m here.”

He sighed and looked down.

I had to do something drastic. I reached out my hand and touched his arm. He felt warm and solid. His shirt was stiff cotton that seemed almost alive under my fingertips.

He looked up and once again, his eyes focused on my space.

“Please,” I said, feeling stone rip and tear away from the building. “Please don’t let me go. You have to say something. I need you to just say that I’m here, that I’m real.”

Dean’s eyes watered and a single tear welled up and trickled down his cheek. “Why am I doing this?” He looked up and let out a long, deep breath. “Why can’t I just let go?”

His question stabbed into me and I took a step back. I was not quite out of the doorway, but I was no longer touching him. Outside, the clawing of the angry voice continued, but I no longer noticed it. I did not notice anything else – not the desks and chairs, not the door. I did not even notice the books in Dean’s hands.

I only noticed the pain in his eyes.

I was not Kate.

Kate was still in the lounge, playing spades with her friends. She was ribbing them playfully and trading off partners so no one would catch onto just how good she was at the game. Card games came easy to her, ever since she was a kid. This summer, she had plans to go to Vegas and try to win herself a slot in one of the poker series there.

Would Dean watch her on the television?

“No,” I said. “You won’t. You’re going to walk out of here and you’re going to let her go.”

I stopped fighting and the raking against stone stopped. The angry voice stopped booming. I looked and saw the white begin to crawl over the window seal and spread along the floor.

“I’m going to let you go,” I said.

Dean wiped the tear away from his cheek and I stepped back. As the whiteness spread to his shadow, he stepped out of the room and walked down the hall. He had forgotten to close the door behind him. I reached over, took hold of the knob, and pulled it closed as the whiteness engulfed my feet.

No point in leaving an open door behind.

********

YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED FROM EXISTENCE!

I looked at the note and smiled wryly. “There’s no need to yell,” I said to the whiteness around me. “I get it.”

What I did not get was why I was here. Why did I still exist? I was not Kate. I was just … what was I? Was I a manifestation of Dean’s pain?

“That doesn’t seem right.” I crumpled up the paper and dropped it. It stopped on what served as the floor of this place, though I knew it was nothing.

How does gravity work in a nothing?

My world before the whiteness was a simple place that revolved around Dean. It had some detail, but only enough to get by. The world I had emerged into, however, was vivid. Everything was unique.

And a man who thought he saw demons had seen me.

“He saw something imaginary.”

Was that what I was, then? Was I from a reality that was … what was it? Was it the story Dean told himself about our relationship? I wondered, then, just how much of it was true.

Probably all of it. I’m sure it was colored by his emotions, but I had known innately Kate’s plans for the summer. I knew she was playing cards in the lounge. I could feel the texture of the cards in her hands.

I was not the story he told. I was the manifestation of Kate from his memory … maybe. It was close enough, I supposed. I had … Kate had messaged him and Dean decided to just let her go.

That was why I had been banished here.

The hole of reality in this place had been his hesitation, I suppose. It had been something of him trying to still hold on. Was it anger? Or regret? I thought about the booming voice. It might have been a distortion of Dean’s voice when he was angry. It might not have been.

I think if any other emotion besides anger had drawn me, though, then the voice would have sounded different.

I sat down and picked up the paper, uncrumpling it and smoothing it out.

What are you going to do now?

I looked around. I could walk until I found another hole of Dean’s regret and pain, but that did not seem interesting to me. I existed and that was, it seemed, not going to change. But that was how the past was.

It still existed.

A blotch broke up the whiteness. I stood and walked toward it. Slowly it formed into the shape of a person.

Someone else had been banished from reality.

“Hey!” I called.

They waved their hand, holding a note. “Do you know what this is about?”

I nodded. I walked carefully, not wanting to fall out of this place.

I knew exactly what it was about. If people were better about handling their pain, I thought I might have had someone here to help me figure it out sooner.

“You have some memories,” I said. I walked up to a dark-skinned man wearing a shredded suit. Blood caked in his hair and he had a large open wound on his shoulder, at the base of his neck. “Let me guess, your last memory had you getting killed.”

The man nodded slowly. “Am I in Heaven?”

I laughed. “No.” He frowned and I held up my hand. “You’re not in Hell either. You’re in the place where pain and regret go when people try to let it go.”

“Oh.” He did not look completely convinced, but he did not look troubled either. “So, what happens now?”

I held out a hand and he took it. Together we walked along the whiteness. “I have no idea. But we might as well figure it out together. I’m Kate’s Shadow, I guess. What’s your name?”

“Bobby,” the man said. “What do you mean a shadow?”

I laughed. “I’m still figuring this out. We don’t get manuals, you know.”

Bobby, or what I supposed was Bobby’s Shadow, let out an “oof” and his hand slipped from mine. I turned to see that his foot had sunk into a hole. I took hold of his hands and pulled him up and out of it.

“What was that?” He looked for where he had fallen.

I quickly pulled him away. “That happens sometimes. It’s no big deal.”

Best not, I thought, to torture some pour soul with this one.