The easiest way was to get myself in the pool and take away his ladder. The quickest was setting myself on fire—I could do that one in about five mouse clicks, then fast forward through the whole thing with Ally trapped outside, milling around the garden. Peas grew in every season, alongside lemons. Eventually Death floated past her, leaving only a pile of ash which she swept and dumped in the bathroom sink. Sometimes, though, she discovered the burning and called the fire department. Sometimes she came armed with an extinguisher. Sometimes she engulfed herself in my flames, and I had to start all over, this time with vengeance.
I was killing myself two, three times a week that winter. Ally brought me back each time, but I wasn’t all the way the same. Notably, there was a rung of taut muscles present across my belly that was not there in real life. I didn’t take it too personally, mostly because he didn’t seem to have a penis. Notably, I did. When he and my wife had sex they did it under the covers—a raucous occasion of flailing lumps, pink and red hearts sprayed across the bed. Occasionally a hand flew free of the blankets, or a foot, perfectly rendered. Ally’s real foot had this toe that curled under the other ones and left a dimple in the flesh. Sometimes she lifted her leg up and the toe asked me questions in an accent that fell somewhere between Baltimore and New Zealand. I felt bad for the other guy, who didn’t know the toe, or that Ally liked to feel the air when she fucked. Even in the dead of winter, she would butterfly kick all the blankets to the foot of the bed, fervent as a swimmer trying to stay afloat.
While I was trying to kill myself all the time I was also trying to buy Ally this credenza, which kept me just about as busy, and while I was trying to buy this credenza, Ally was once again changing her laptop password. It was always to some iteration of a famous dog—B3nj1, Kuj0, Lass13. The guessing took almost as long as the killing did only because there were so many famous dogs in the world. Once, just after she moved in, I came home and Ally was crying on the couch, absolutely losing it, clutching our old terrier Frito. Frito was treating her as a salt lick and having the time of his life. On the TV, she’d queued up a video about Laika.
“They took him home first, to play with their kids.”
“Oh. Wow.”
Ally cried harder and repeated herself, getting incrementally madder. At me, I guess. I kept saying that’s crazy. Oh, man. They took him home to play with their kids first. Seconds doubled over on themselves, the two of us stuck there with the other. The thing about seconds is that you have to inhabit them. You have to listen to Ally say the same thing over and over, like someone had scratched her vinyl. I reached into my script of perfect answers and came up shit. In the face of oblivion, all I had was sucks and bummer. Frito’s tongue lapped up and down her face in a perfect loop.The more she said it the angier I got. There was a ferocity to her conviction I didn’t recognize in myself. Where she had convictions—her tragedies so far past there was no way to intervene, always picking a fight with something so big it didn’t know she existed—I had this Sputnik sized lump in my throat, and sometimes stomach. It traveleled around my body and blocked a series of important arteries. The kind that left me sympathetic to Soviet astronauts, and my wife. A lump that left me with less than even a dog might feel.
The credenza was a lot like the one in the house she’d created, but 3D and more expensive. As soon as I asked the guy if it was teak he said yes, then changed the listing for an additional hundred dollars. Like most people, we were into mid-century modern. Clean borders and varying shades of brown. Occasionally, mustard. The houses Ally designed were identical to ours but with better rugs, more windows. Occasionally, saffron. We’d been together for an amount of time that meant most of the stuff in our house was both of ours, no longer one distinct owner. There’s our coffee table with the round corners, there’s our bookshelf from IKEA, cheap as hell but somehow surviving all the moves. I told her once that if they did ever nuke us all the shelf would survive while we would be ashes. I must’ve sounded dreamier than I meant because Ally held up her hand.
“Don’t even start with me, Nick.”
Ally was afraid of the nuclear apocalypse and sneaker waves and I was afraid of regular things like my boss being mad at me and having to get old, so in therapy we had to talk a lot about validating the other. I thought the credenza would be pretty validating but this guy was giving me the real run around. First he could drop off and then he couldn’t. Then, he could arrange a pickup for the next weekend before telling me a few hours later he was going out of town. I said, do you even wanna sell this thing? He replied, I’m still deciding. I’m waiting to see what my options become.
Most nights I was up on my phone while Ally lay next to me. I could tell that she’d be waiting for me to put it down and talk to her. When I say I could tell, I mean that sometimes she would say stuff like hey what are you looking at, with a reedy whine in her voice. The whine raised the hairs on my neck and made the lump go nuts. It felt like shit and I had to think things like I love my wife, which felt like shit too. The lump migrated around and lodged itself in the corner of my eyes, close to crying but never quite there. I loved my wife and I wish she’d leave me alone until I feel better. I loved my wife and I couldn’t explain what I was looking for. I’d be scrolling around on OfferUp and Craigslist looking at credenzas and saffron rugs and pictures of my ex-girlfriend walking the stage to finally get her bachelors. What an accomplishment, I told myself. The lump was blocking the spigot where goodness should come out. I was waiting for something to click and press a button that would let me rest, that felt good enough to end the day on, but all the furniture was covered in dog hair and my ex started dating that guy next to her in the picture so soon after we broke up, the kind of soon that makes you wonder. The hair and the guy and the lump conspired to press the bad button that meant I couldn’t sleep. I had to start all over. Eventually Ally always gave up and fell asleep, and I could wrest the laptop from her grip. She curled like a comma around it, attempting to stay my execution but I always managed to lay waste to myself.
It was around 1 AM the night I discovered Ally had moved me, a decoy husband now in our house. His name was a letter off from mine, R instead of N. I was getting it all set up to trap myself in a murphy bed when I noticed. He had lighter hair than me and a mustache and I hated that guy and was desperate to know if he’d fucked my wife. I clicked a few buttons but he didn’t seem to have much of a relationship with her, just a half full green bar with no pink underneath. An extra bed had appeared, shuffled awkwardly into her rendition of our office, which had better light and significantly more easels than our real one. Even pretending, she was faithful, but I crushed Rick out of principle. While Rick was entering another realm my phone buzzed and it was the credenza guy and he wanted to know if I could come get it on Friday. I said sure. The seller’s name was just the letter R, with a ghostly gray silhouette for his profile. Is your name Rick by any chance? The guy just said no, and sent me the address. The other Ally wept over the headstone Rick had become, but she recovered quickly, painting on one of the easels with flamboyant strokes. I watched her at .5x speed for a long time while the real one slept next to me, the blankets tucked under her chin. She pressed her strange toe into my leg. The other Ally was different as well. She had the patience for painting and gardening, two tasks she aspired to in life but failed to complete, the basement a graveyard of seed starts and brushes. Cardboard coffins lined the plaster walls. Here lies the idea of the person she wanted to be, buried under who she was. The other Ally was a judge, departing each day in black robes that glitched around her knees, which did not bear her usual Michigan shaped birthmark. She did not seem to weep openly while looking at Twitter, and in fact didn’t seem to look at it at all. Notably, we were happy together, at least until it was under my control. Eventually I found myself four houses over, in a mansion empty but for a phone and pizza delivery boxes, a toilet and our television. It was a nice touch, I thought, that she’d worried I might be bored. I broke it, then shoved his finger in the socket. Across his body, sparks.
Our therapist thought it an OK thing to do, me killing myself so often. There were three clocks in his office, one behind his head and one behind ours and a third to the left of us, visible from all our seats. Ally jiggled her knee up and down while she told him all about my spree.
“An exercise in theoretical,” he suggested around a yawn. Our therapist was always yawning. It’s a tired time of day, he’d tell us. I felt that for two hundred dollars a session he should be more lively but it was moot to bring it up. The clocks would tick too much time away while we talked about it, all of them reading one minute later or earlier than the others so I never knew, really, when we were supposed to call it. The therapist had an internal meter that let him know which hands to believe. I did not trust him to fix me, but I believed he knew better than us when to be done.
“Our priority is keeping Nick safe. Are you safe, Nick?” He asked me all his questions in mandatory reporter English. I said yes. I said of course. I told them both about the fish oil. I took so much I thought I might grow scales, a birthmark of my own, pearlescent and hydrophobic. Ally could keep me in the bathtub and sprinkle me in flakes. Behind him, one of the clocks ticked closer to when I needed to go get the credenza. The other stayed the same. R had messaged me three times over the course of a day to confirm. NO FLAKES he insisted.
“I just want him to be happy. Happy people don’t do this kind of thing.” Ally said, but happy people did all kinds of things. Happy was a mid-point between the seconds, suffocating or drowning, never bigger than the other thing that collapsed in the middle of me. You’re a black hole Ally screamed in a fight once. I know, I yelled back. I’m telling you. We had the fight in front of our therapist who looked passively back and forth between us. Just like that time, Ally’s cheeks flushed a frustrated pink. Just like that time, our therapist glanced at the clock behind our heads and said, “We’re gonna have to stop now, guys.”
I told Ally I had to go run an errand and she just said whatever. The corners of her eyes were shiny as she slammed her car door and sat, waiting for me to drive away first. I snuck a glance and saw her with her head on the steering wheel, arms by her side. Not moving. Slug mode, we called it. She used to holler at me from the next room, I’m going slug mode! My job was to lie on top of her and kiss her until she wriggled wildly and wrapped her arms around me, thoroughly salty.
I drove all the way out to Tujunga to get the credenza, getting closer to the mountains, which never seemed to change. A flat, beige wash of landscape. If you squinted there were chaparral shrubs, some trees with branches more like threats.
R’s house was square like a toaster, covered in blue clapboard. Just a rectangle with windows and a door. Something you could stick a fork in. Once in Ally’s game I tried my hand at building a house and it looked like that—perfunctory. In front of the toaster I went slug mode, and it felt pretty good until there was a sharp rap on the driver’s side window and I jerked up.
“Are you Nick?”
“I am.”
“OK. I’m Rhonda. You wanna come do this thing?”
Inside the house was full of stuff, nothing boxed. Just piles. Some of the piles had notes stuck on top, craigslist, fb marketplace, Goodwill, but most of it was haphazard. Rhonda walked through the room like she’s accusing it of something and yanked a moving blanket off the credenza. It was smaller and lightly scratched on the legs, a ring where someone had left a wet glass, the condensation licking away the wood grain. While Rhonda unzipped a plastic envelope I regretted the purchase, the long drive, but I was already there, so I handed her three hundred dollar bills. She frowned, holding them each up to the light of the window.
“They’re real.” I asserted, offended by her rigor. Self righteous was a feeling the lump allowed, preferred in fact. Rhonda’s raised an eyebrow at me, darker than her hair which was bleached to hell, roots slick as an oil spill. There was a theoretically Celtic braided knot tattooed on her neck, a couple years old, the outline completely blown out. I couldn’t tell if she was much older or the same age as me. I couldn’t tell which I’d prefer, to pity how her life turned out or worry how close I might be to it, the chaos of her piles. I didn’t even like when Ally left her underwear on the floor, but lately I’d been forgetting things. Taking something out of my pocket and finding them in strange cairns the next day, stacked with other relics of the day. Receipts and my keys and an old pocket knife in one, wedding band and gas bill and two sharpies in another and my hands couldn’t quite recall the putting down.
“Are you moving?” I asked the room. Rhonda nodded fiercely.
“Yup, van life.” She gestured out the window at a sprinter van, the same primary blue as the house.
“I just can’t be tied down to a physical address now. Knowing, you know. What I know.” She looked at me meaningfully. I tried to ignore the platter on which she had served me this conversation, the obvious question she wanted me to ask. I ran my fingers across the length of the credenza. They came back sticky.
“Are you familiar with simulation theory?” I looked up.
“Like The Sims? My wife––”
“You’re thinking too small. That’s just one little world and all the worlds are different.” Rhonda began moving things from pile to pile, smiling beautifully. Her teeth were straight and shiny, perfectly white. The collapsed middle of me wanted to chew them like gum, or else build a stack with them.
“Basically we’re all living in the same simulation. The computer that’s running the whole joint,” She gestured at the piles, at me, out the window towards my car where the door was hanging open. “A computer you can’t even imagine. It’s absolutely beyond any computer you have, or even like Steve Jobs has. And the person, well not person, I think of them as the Programmer, they coded us. Our lives. There’s probably more than one programmer. And they’re centuries, I mean light years more advanced than you and me. We’re actually the reflection, the proto-people. We’re the original race and the programmers are, like, our far far ancestors who wanted to see how we lived. I wanna go out and look for the glitches, you know. Breaks in the code.” Her cheeks flushed the same frustrated pink as Ally’s during sessions and Ally’s during sex and Ally’s during a particularly rousing game of kickball at her company Labor Day Party. I only saw the photos, having collapsed in the middle that morning, unable to go eat hot dogs with the rest of humanity.
“Wow, that’s—” Rhonda held up her hand.
“It’s not crazy. If you think about it. Have you ever seen a plane that doesn’t seem like it’s moving, or like, you were walking into a moment that you knew was coming but can’t tell what happens next?” She paused and pressed her hands to either side of her face, suddenly calm. “It’s not crazy.”
Dust motes floated in the anemic light, dancing around her head and all the piles, and I wondered how the code figured for that, the 1 and 0’s that amounted to entropy. Rhonda reached out and patted my arm.
“Hey. Hey man, it’s OK. It’s a lot at first. It’s OK.” She turned around, eventually coming up with a battered roll of paper towels. She ripped two off and wiped them roughly across my face, which I discovered was suddenly very wet, her face close to mine until it all blurred, the resolution obscured.
Ally liked the credenza OK. When she saw it the skin around her eyes tightened but she said thanks. She put a single flower in an old sake cup on it and a few days later, some books. The week after, a dish with all the spare keys we’d accumulated. I stared at them and wondered if we’d needed them, if the doors wouldn’t have just opened under our hands, commanded by something vast so we could enter the next sequence of code. I didn’t tell Ally about any of it. She seemed fine living in the lines of the world, and I wasn’t sure if it would be a relief—none of it was real and she didn’t have to worry. Or worse—none of it was real and she still had to feel it. Sometimes when I reached out to touch her she startled and I marveled at the function of surprise in a world like this. The way her skin goose pimpled when I raked my mouth across her thighs, suddenly hungry for the taste and feeling of her. I stopped taking the pills that made it impossible to get hard but easy to stare at walls and not bang my head into them. I kept my head mostly off hard surfaces, and relished the iterations of our bodies. After we finished, my heart pounded for a long time, Ally’s breath became steady and hot on my arm, the Programmers typing in a few exceptions that made her snore. I’d begun working in a new save file on her computer, so she couldn’t tell anymore. As a result, she’d become less possessive about her laptop. Once she even shyly showed me a new house she had designed, a vaulted roof with clerestory windows, a landing covered in pastel toys and rugs. I looked through every room, zooming in and out to get the whole picture.
“It’s a stupid game.” She mumbled, but smiled at me when I took her hand.
“You’re doing great work, Ally. God’s work.”
In my save file I am surrounded by Ally’s, and as many of her there are me. Some of us have kids and others don’t and all the Ally’s are artists. In the save file I cook and clean and teach our perfect sons how to walk. If they’re born with my ash hair I go in and change it, gifting them her dark curls. In the save file my sons are excellent at basketball, or else woodworking. They are all of them me and all of them Ally. Sometimes one of me dies. It’s not a perfect world. With so many bodies you forget to feed a few, focusing on the sons and Ally’s. A few of me even grow into old age. Their shoulders hunch, the belly draws out a little. In every simulation, even mine, age disfigures the line of a body. When my sons grow up—and they all do, never punished under my negligence, I put them into one, big house. Eventually two. There are so many sons with capable hands and the houses fill up with woodwork. Some of them marry and leave their brothers and then there are grandsons. I free them from under my rule, placing them into new neighborhoods. Like any maker, eventually you have to look away. From there, who knows. I have to take care of Ally’s, and by extension, me. Everyone once in a while there is a lull in our life. No sons, the Ally and I’s too old or young to be thinking about it. She’s either busy with her painting or her gardening, and I am also there. I draw them each out into the park in the save files square. Clumsily the me’s weave around all my different bodies. I make them lie down awhile in this perfect world, no stars but still bright, still lit. All the different Ally’s circle them, reaching, talking. A gibberish nightsong, and I am jealous of him, this perfect world he inhabits. The gift of a benevolent god who is trying hard to love them.
Emily Myles is a writer from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in HAD, Split Lip, Write or Die and elsewhere, and been nominated for the PEN/DAU and Best of the Net awards. She currently resides in Portland, OR and is at work on a collection of short fiction.