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When Gemma looks around her, she doesn't see her surroundings. Instead, she stitches together past and present into a feverish joint reality.
It's the only way to get by - superimposing color and history over this visual wasteland.
Otherwise, what does she have?
The room is empty - even with her in it. Especially with her in it.
Gemma doesn't know where they take her when she does get to leave.
She tries to reconstruct the rooms' contents based on the smallest indicators. Sometimes she'll carry a scent on her skin - all the way back into the blindingly bright hallway.
After Allentown: faint pine and ink. After Wellington: something plain and sterile, like a doctor's office; mint sitting heavy on her breath.
Always, underneath it all, that awful cloying hospital scent. As if a Shining-level tidal wave of cleaning product washed down the hall every evening, foaming and devouring, disintegrating just in time for the next day.
All she has is the distance between reality and memory. Lumon is determined to dissolve this, too, through the sheer monotony of it all. The sensory menu is limited: white, smooth, inoffensive. Any speck of character is sanded down, erased from existence. It's up to Gemma to notice and collect any deviation, so she does - urgently.
She's become a hoarder of these treasures. She manufactures them, too, when she can, though she only ever gets to keep the memory.
Once, she filled up the tiny sink by stuffing a Lumon washcloth halfway down the drain and letting water collect. Then she closed her eyes and set her palm against the flat, cool surface.
She relished the exact moment the water jumped to meet her skin, clung there.
In that instant Gemma could imagine larger bodies of it, real blue and salt, stretching past the horizon.
(Horizon - a meaningless term here.)
She half-remembered the mechanics behind the adhesion to her skin. Surface tension. Some property that has to do with capillary action?
No way of checking now.
Freedom can look like so many things. As in this latest example - the ability to wonder something one second and draw on the collective wisdom of the internet the next.
Anyone can post whatever nonsense they like on the internet. She'd told Mark over and over, but he'd still wave his phone after a hasty Google search, mid-argument, claiming incontrovertible proof of his opinion's validity.
"See? It says right here -" And he had the audacity to point to some anonymous blog post from 2007.
"You can't believe everything you read on the internet," Gemma countered, already opening Wikipedia. She picked a page - for special flair, a World War 1 subtopic he'd lost his mind over in undergrad - and made her own absurd edit.
"Citation needed," Mark noted, peering over her shoulder.
"That's never stopped anyone before." Click.
"Hmmm." He scratched his head. "A compelling demonstration, Professor. I still happen to think I'm correct here."
What was the last thing she searched on her phone? Try as she might, she can't picture it.
Gemma blinks slowly, mechanically. Like the wheel of lenses clicking between options at the optometrist.
She kept her eyes trained obediently on the middle distance.
"Is lens one better, or…two?"
Lens 1: Mark, stubble sharp and weaponized against her chin as Gemma shoved his shoulder, tried to get away, laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. So much that her abs hurt, long after she stopped and forced him to shave.
Lens 2: Stomach muscles burning, nearing the end of her confinement-tailored workout. Plank position - counting through the tremor of exhausted muscles. She will wake the next day with at least one soreness of her choosing. A pain with an origin she remembers.
Gemma closes her eyes.
The past has slipped out of focus.
"Go ahead and read the smallest row of letters you can."
Such a thin line between wavering blobs and units of language. She found it impressive, how something could be shrunken by distance and still carry meaning.
"Here's lens one again…and two -"
Lens 1: Her arm draped over him. The two of them in the mirror. She scolded him for wiping his face on the nice hand towel; he looked appropriately bashful.
Lens 2: Pale sink, pale walls. Even the towel above the sink hangs limp and dejected. Sometimes she crumples it slightly, to give it volume, a lived-in look.
"One, or…two?….or are they about the same?"
No amount of straining can make them equal.
"Two."
The plant sitting atop her small triangular table is another lackluster nod to the richness of the outside world. It's a cheap parody, a plastic affront to her beloved hobby. But she knows it would be selfish to want another living thing trapped here, only for marginal comfort. So she pretends not to see the dullness of its leaves.
Mark had decor like that, when they first met. She found it funny, this suave professor with leather elbow patches and polished shoes — and his bachelor-pad, plastic fern and all.
She pointed it out the first time she stayed over, unable to suppress a grin.
He shrugged. "Guess I never had a reason to beautify before."
"You do now," she'd said, and pretended not to be affected by his toothy grin.
Gemma tried to smile - yesterday? or the day before - into the mirror. Flexing the muscle to check for atrophy. The result was so uncanny that she's been avoiding her reflection ever since.
The reflection of her pupil, ringed with brown. Magnified and refracted, it slid into view as the optometrist adjusted his positioning.
"We're going to use an instrument that takes the pressure of your eye."
The part where Gemma always willed herself not to blink preemptively, and usually managed it.
They gave her eye drops, first. The splash of the liquid - a faint sting, then the numbness. The assistant handed her a tissue to blot any excess.
When the lights came back on, she glanced at the tissue clenched in her hand and saw yellow. Surprisingly pigmented. She asked and they said it glowed under blue light, helped them take their measurements and check for abnormalities.
Gemma thought she wiped it all away, but later, Mark traced a streak down her cheekbone, frowning. "Did you, uh, cry out some jaundice earlier?"
Now she wonders: did that bottle also bear the Lumon logo? How much had they invaded her life before all this? Was there a before, truly? She hadn't paid enough attention. But now it seems they're the bug under every rock she lifts.
"Pressure a little on the higher side," the doctor noted, "but within acceptable range."
She asked idly about possible causes. The answer was unsurprising: some one-two punch of stress and caffeine consumption. Her weaknesses, made all the more heavy for their well-documented effects on fertility.
Gemma can hardly bear to think of the microscopic shifts where the slightest of differences could have led her down a different road. To imagine cells dividing in the ways she dreamed of, growing into a shared, cherished creation.
Instead of whatever the fuck they've done to her here.
At least she was able to watch the blood circle the shower drain, that awful day. She's never met the new people they've pried out of her brain. She never will.
A bright light eclipsed all else, and the doctor called out numbers that meant nothing to Gemma. The assistant scribbled notes in the corner, echoing the values faithfully.
The inverted after-image clung to the corner of her vision, persistent. She stopped noticing it long before it faded.
Sometimes she presses her thumb to the mirror and inspects the smudge left behind. Whatever they've done to her, she still has fingerprints.
It's always wiped away by the time she returns to the room. In another context, she'd be mildly impressed with how clean Lumon keeps everything. No signs of habitation. No possessions lovingly marked with dust and dirt, claimed and kept.
At home, they never managed to keep up with dusting - too many surfaces, not enough time. Or maybe it just never mattered that much to them.
Whatever the case, the library had been the worst for setting her off. The infamous sneeze sequence.
Mark always held his finger aloft - 'Please hold' - and patiently reserved his blessings for after the final instance.
It happened once when they were fighting. In the space between the first and second sneeze, Gemma looked at him with red, swollen eyes; he looked at her and timidly raised a finger. She'd choke-sneeze-laughed and tipped her head against his shoulder. Some wall between them crumbled; they folded into each other, all relief and sniffles. A return to closeness.
"I'm still mad at you," she said, into his chest.
"Oh, me too," he assured her.
But behind it, always - It's me, I'm here, I'm yours, I'm sorry.
Remembering, now, the lens shatters.
Gemma shuts her eyes tight, just for a moment. Please. Come back.
Lens 1: Flimsy wraparound plastic glasses to shield her dilated pupils. The drive home, eyes shut. Sun still filtered warm through the backs of her eyelids in leaf-cut kaleidoscope patterns, on-off-on. Infinite tomorrows.
Lens 2: It's been several weeks since she cried. But now it's happening, against her will, humiliating and hot.
Lens 1: After the pupil dilation, she couldn't read anything within three feet from her face. Mark dutifully relayed her emails to her until the effects faded.
"This is good practice for when you're old and decrepit."
"Bold of you to assume you won't need glasses."
"Well, at that point I'll have some kind of cool bionic eye, clearly. You'll abstain on ethical grounds ..but luckily, I'll be there to take care of you."
The stupid grin, again.
Lens 2: She looks at the locked door with perfect clarity.
Blurrier: the well-intentioned promise. I’ll be there to take care of you. At the time, they both believed it.
Sometimes, alone at night, after they dim the lights in careful increments (never completely), Gemma lays perfectly still and holds her breath. Imagines how long it would take them to notice if she simply…stopped.
One summer night they camped out under the stars. Flat on their backs, side to side, heads angled together. There was a meteor shower expected, and conditions seemed favorable. The air was still so brisk it was only bearable in their shared body heat, tucked in Mark's absurdly highly—rated sleeping bag.
He'd read somewhere - probably in another blog post - about all the best strategies for hunting shooting stars - scanning in the precise, rhythmic sweep lifeguards are trained to adopt.
"You never want to linger anywhere too long," he explained to Gemma. She could feel the line of his shoulder pressed against her, tense with the concentration of it. Adorable.
As usual, she let her gaze go into a soft focus. The first movement in her wide field of vision would draw her eyes, with perfect precision, right to the streak of light.
Meanwhile, Mark would be staring determinedly at the wrong half of the sky.
It drove him insane.
"How do you do that?!" He shook his head in disbelief. The indignant huff of air crystallized in the air before them.
She smiled up at the stars. "You could try looking in the right place, to start."