Bull's Eye

I hold up a marble to the candle on my desk. I found it a while ago, before I was placed under what is essentially house arrest. The flame flickers and dances in the glass, as if it has been captured in the little orb. In the dark, it is illuminated like a miniature sun, a yellow aura. The other marble, its twin, is in my pocket. This is what I have been reduced to, playing with beads in the near-blackness. No phone, no TV, no books, no games. The lack of stimuli is agonizing, even more so than the actual pain.

It began about a week ago. Or was it a few days? Two weeks? I’m not sure. Time means nothing now — even if I tried, my memory stutters in and out, a vinyl that has seen one too many scratches to be playable anymore. I remember the start viscerally, though.

The pain roused me from sleep. This was unusual, as I am dead to the world in my sleep. Evidently, I am not entirely unreachable, as the sensation yanked me so violently from my rest that I awoke with complete awareness of my body, my room. It was, without a doubt, the worst pain I have ever felt. I fell out of bed and half-crawled to the bathroom, where I promptly threw up over the side of the tub. My ears were ringing. You know how we all have a threshold for pain? Mine was low to begin with, but this was kilometers above that line. I won’t even try explaining it further than that. It’s one of those things that’s abstract until it’s not.

If you haven’t guessed already, I had (have?) a concussion. Kind of anticlimactic, right? I wish it was caused by something that would lend me a little more street cred, but no dice. I was hit in the head, really hard. That’s all.

It must’ve been pretty damn hard, since they diagnosed me at a Grade 3. I didn’t even know there was a scale. It also never occurred to me that I had a concussion, likely because of the concussion itself. I stumbled home in a daze. I didn’t really remember anything significant happening, only that my forehead hurt, but not intolerably so. My glasses were cracked. I thought I had sat on them by mistake. I know, making myself look like a real badass here.

Fast forward a few hours—bathroom. Cosmic-level agony. I kicked the wall with what little strength I had until my parents found me, moaning incomprehensibly on the floor beside a bathtub too graphic to describe. I vomited in the car and again in the hospital waiting room. I wore a sun visor and shades while we waited, and wondered why the hell the fluorescent lighting was so bright in a place designated for the sick and suffering. I begged the nurse for morphine while dressed like the world’s saddest tourist to Hawai’i. She gave me a sympathetic look and two Tylenol instead.

You’re basically up to date now. I don’t want to think about it anymore; my head hurts from the exertion. I’ve been sitting in a dark room for days—light is one of the triggers for my near-daily intense headaches. We don’t have curtains so my mom and I pinned all manner of sheets and towels on my bedroom walls. It looks kind of cool, like a patchwork quilt, or an art installation. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. At night they billow with the breeze like apparitions, rising and falling with the Earth’s breath.

I guess it’s not so different from my regular routine, only a lot more boring now that I can’t play video games. It’s been at least a week, maybe two, since I played. I played every day up until now, but screens are off the table, for obvious reasons. Can’t read or watch something, either. I can listen to audiobooks but they’re so incredibly boring. I find myself playing through video games in my head instead.

Specifically, I play from the point I was forced to stop at in my current game. Out of everything, I still remember it with startling clarity. It was an indie game called Bull’s Eye. I had just left the temple of the Divine Bull, Farahti. The foundation of the temple was cracked and split, the columns degrading and in a state of half-collapse, the beautiful arches coated in dark vines. Light diffused into the temple through tattered, gauzy panels of sheer cloth. The sound of water dripping echoed through the main chamber, strangely so, as the temple was open-air. The grand, marble altar at the back of the chamber was cracked cleanly in half. The whole experience was eerie. I felt like I was being watched, though the place was seemingly empty. I can only imagine it had once been stunningly beautiful, a bustling capital of spiritual affairs.

From what I’ve garnered, Farahti is a god-like entity, a deity. There are depictions of him everywhere in the game — carved into trees, smeared paintings stowed away in waterlogged books, statues in various states of disrepair. I’m sure there are even more that I missed. There’s a large pond you end up visiting a multitude of times, as the koi fish are fed upon secrets. They are fat and flourishing, despite the starved look of the scenery. You can catch one by offering it one of your innermost secrets, and if you do, the pattern of its scales forms a unique sigil, containing combinations of circles, squares, triangles, and crosses—all of which are buttons on the remote. If you press them in the right sequence, you’ll hear a secret someone else told the koi, each of which provides a little more heart-pounding context for the derelict state of this world. When you get an aerial view of the lake, it is Farahti’s face, with lotus flower eyes and green tendril horns, as if the secrets swim within Farahti himself.

Oh, shit—my watch is beeping. I need to walk Solomon. It’s one of my few pleasures currently, these night walks. He’s a big ol' hound so no one ever bothers us, either.

The night is still, the air bordering frigid. It’s quiet, too. We live on the verge of the suburbs, which suits me just fine. There’s a giant park not even five minutes from our house, with a long, meandering sidewalk that takes you through groves of trees and over a long, Japanese-style wooden bridge. We usually walk to the bridge and back, which takes just over an hour. My mind drifts back to Bull’s Eye as Solomon pads alongside me, his collar jingling softly.

I had just found the remains of a journal in the temple. It was also waterlogged, but from what I read, Farahti’s golden eyes could discern the truth behind illusion, and his prophecies maintained the harmony of society and its inhabitants. In his depictions, his massive horns spiral outwards in tight curves, and from them hang all manner of exquisite beads and ornaments, candlelit lanterns, and stained glass. His ears and nose are pierced with gold loops, and his coat and tufts of hair are a silky jet-black. He maintained the peace until his eyes were stolen in the night by an unnamed thief, many years ago. Unable to discern truth from illusion, he could no longer distinguish morality from immorality. He became Vahta, The Unseeing One.

The sound of footsteps on wood snaps me back to the present. We’re at the bridge. Shit, when did we get to the bridge? I could’ve sworn it’s only been fifteen minutes. I look towards Solomon as if he can tell me, but he’s not even looking at me. He’s staring intently into the dark, his hackles raised, his head low. His lips are curled, and my blood immediately runs cold. Solomon is not easily intimidated.

I rapidly start feeling my pockets for my phone. The fear is making me clumsy, or perhaps it’s the concussion. I drag it from my pocket and immediately drop it. It clatters to the ground, the sound echoing throughout the park. Why is it so loud? Why can’t I hear anything else?

Before I can pick it up, I hear footsteps again, but brittle, like wood against wood. I don’t want to look. I don’t want to look, but I do.

Yellow—no, golden—eyes glow in the dark in front of me. Blood rushes to my head. I might faint. Solomon has not moved, but every muscle in his body is tensed.

“Is it that you are lost?” The eyes ask me in the dark. It stands on the other side of the bridge, but it sounds like it is speaking in my ear. The voice that emerges sounds like three people speaking at once. I already know what they will say next. I heard it in the Bull’s Eye intro. “Or do you simply not know what you are looking for?”

The golden eyes blink, the color disappearing for a moment before the yellow hue starts to drain from the two glowing orbs in the dark, dripping onto the bridge like tears, losing their luster as soon as they hit the wood. In its place are two black orbs. They are not black, but rather, the absence of color. A vacuum where light should’ve been.

“Why have you taken from me?” The voices speak so perfectly in unison, it sounds like a hellish harmony. My legs feel locked in place.

Panic rises in my throat. “I haven’t,” I answer meekly. My voice cracks. My mouth is so dry. My head is pounding. I can barely remember why I’m here, speaking to the faceless dark.

“If you had asked, I would have freely given. I know you have already looked through them. You have desecrated them. But know that whatever answers you find, you will beg to forget. You have begged me already.”

“I haven’t taken from you. I swear! I… I-I can’t remember. I haven’t talked to you, ever!” Words pour from my mouth in a disordered stream, faster than my lagging brain can process. I want to look to Solomon but I can’t tear my vision away from the two black-hole eyes across the bridge.

“You have before, and you will again.” The shadow of a beast rushes forward in the dark, the sound of hooves echoing on the endless bridge, the tinkling of ornaments. Before I can move it is upon me, he is upon me, and all I can remember is the smell of his breath —like acrid, dry soil, like a toy long-buried— before he slams into me headfirst, the sound ringing like a gong in the dark, its vibration shuddering through my body, a cracking glass, or perhaps that is the sensation of hitting the ground. It doesn’t matter. I am gone.

————————————

Wake to a splitting pain. Barely fumble out of bed. My hands are slow but my body screams with urgency. I almost get tangled in my sheets on the way down. Stagger to the bathroom, a hand outstretched to catch myself if I fall, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do that should it happen. I clutch the edge of the bathtub as I wretch violently, every heaving gasp only intensifying the pain. As soon as I’m done it’s all I can do to slip to the floor. Try to yell but whimper instead. My own voice is too loud. The hurt is blinding. The lens of my glasses is cracked.

Solomon licks my face. I manage to stand, reaching for the sink. The surface feels too smooth, like a stone altar. The drapes on my window are sheer; the moon peers through them. I look in the mirror to meet my reflection, only to find a set of golden eyes gazing back at me, glowing in the dark.