Charlotte

“What’re you doing?” I asked Charlie as I saw him very focused on something on his laptop, which was a kind of tiny computer as per him. Though, a smartphone, as far as I could tell, was also a tiny computer, so I didn’t really understand this nomenclature at all.

“I’m uh, trying to make a photo of you,” he said. “On Photoshop.” Great. More words that I didn’t understand. I didn’t fault Charlie much for this, but he would often run off and say things as if he fully expected me to understand what he was saying. Many times, I didn’t.

I did understand what was on the screen though. It was a picture of me, thankfully though not in that hoodie of his, though my face had been blanked out. It looked like he had erased it. “What exactly are you trying to do?”

“Oh,” he said. “I uh, mentioned you to my parents and that we were, you know, together… they asked to see a picture of you. I couldn’t exactly show them one, but they’re going to ask eventually, so I was trying to ah, make a photo of you with a more human face.”

He was too focused on the laptop to notice, but my face fell. Already, there was a big obstacle. It was true my face did not look entirely like a human’s, though, again, like with many other things, before this time when I had fallen in love, this had not bothered me.

“Alright, this is what I’ve come up with,” he said. He then pressed a few buttons, and like a magician waving a magic wand, the colors on the screen melded together to form a portrait of me.

I was looking slightly away, so my whole face wouldn’t have been visible anyway in the photo. My hands were away, so they wouldn’t betray my nature either.

My face was now replaced with that of a woman whose skin tone was slightly darker than what mine had originally been. The eyes were also not the correct shade, and I felt like the nose was off in some way. I may have forgotten much, but I hadn’t forgotten what my face looked like. “Ah, can you change a few things?”

It became clear after ten minutes that Charlie wasn’t extremely good at this, and no permutation of features could really capture what I looked like at the time, I thought, but this at the very least came close. “Seems good enough.”

“Okay,” he said. “If you say so.”

Still, it bothered me to no end that he couldn’t send an actual photo, at least not at this time.

The second incident happened the next day. We were trying out something different in VR, a game in which you explore a maze with creatures popping out at you. I think it was intended to be scary, but there was no other word for the graphics except for ‘silly’ and so I had to say that it ended up being the exact opposite of intended.

“There was something I wanted to bring up,” Charlie said. You couldn’t customize who you were playing as in this game, and the default character selection was rather drab, but I guess that character customization wasn’t the point of the whole thing.

“What is it?” I asked. I was busy trying to open up a chest - but the way that this game made you solve puzzles to do things was extremely inefficient and borderline migraine-inducing. I wasn’t really paying attention that much to what Charlie was saying.

“Uh, next week, George- he’s one of the people I work with, invited me to a hangout with my other workers. I was invited last time too, but I was going to go see my parents, so I refused at that time. This time though, I felt like I couldn’t say ‘no,’” he said.

“That’s fine, so what’s the issue?” I asked.

“Nothing, just that because it’s during the day, it might mess with my schedule, and I might sleep the night after so, we won’t be able to do things like this that night,” he said.

A flock of bats flew out at us from the chest I had just opened, though again, they were so badly animated that I couldn’t find it within me to even pretend I was scared for his sake.

However, when I got a chance to mull his words over later, I couldn’t help but think as to why he never seemed to invite any of his work friends over at any point.

And the answer was clear the moment I posed that question to myself.

Because of me.

Of course he couldn’t invite anyone over, even if he wanted to. Memories of my father bringing over some of his business partners for dinner, during which time I was asked to stay in my room and make as little noise as possible, came back to me. Still, I would catch glimpses of those dinner parties, and as those people usually came over with their wives, my mother was also very involved in planning them and hosting them.

Something that I couldn’t do. Yet another area in which I was deficient compared to her. I wished I could talk to her now, if it was just for a scrap of advice on what I should do.

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“Charlie… what kind of work do you do?” He had told me about it in the past, but even now, I had trouble wrapping my head around it. “You don’t ever seem to talk about work or your workmates.”

“Well, it’s not like either of those things are really interesting,” he said. “I mean, my job just involves moving things around most of the time, and my workmates just usually sit around and either smoke, sleep, or play video games when they get a break.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly it’s quite boring, but I prefer it to my old job. That might’ve been interesting, but I couldn’t stand it.”

“Your job as a nurse.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I think I can understand why the Chinese say ‘May you live in interesting times’ as more of a curse than a blessing. I certainly didn’t expect to be in the position I was at the time.”

“At what time?”

“During COVID.”

“...what’s COVID?”

Charlie then paused what he was doing, and it wasn’t because of the werewolf that had popped out. I had seen a modern werewolf movie on television, and this had nothing on it. I guess it was a side effect of seeing modern horror movies and how good their effects were (even if that was occasionally the only thing that was good about them) that nothing made in the early days even comes close to scaring me now. And certainly nothing in this game could even cause me to flinch. “Uh… wow, sorry, I just didn’t think that I would explaining what COVID was to people until like forty years in the future and I was an old man telling my grandkids about what my old days were like.”

He then took off his VR set, pausing the game, and I did the same. As it was, I wasn’t really enjoying this. It was better than the fishing game, but the graphics just weren’t doing it for me.

Charlie looked off through the wall, as if he was looking out into the distance. “It was this pandemic due to this disease that affected the lungs, but it was bad. Really bad.” He shook his head. “It almost feels surreal talking about it. You weren’t alive during the Spanish Flu, were you?”

“I haven’t heard of it, so I can’t be sure,” I said.

“Well, it was the talk of the town,” Charlie said. “COVID I mean- I didn’t think there was anyone who was an adult in the last few years who wouldn’t know what it was. I didn’t mean that to offend you either, Charlotte, I know about your situation and that you wouldn’t be privy to it, it’s just… even knowing all that it’s still shocking to hear someone question what it was.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me, I understand,” I said. “So, it was a really big pandemic?”

“That’s underestimating it,” Charlie said. “I mean, the whole world kinda just… stopped for a moment. Airports shut down, nearly everything shut down come to think of it. I had… never experience something like it.” He then shook his head. “A part of me even feels like it’s hard to believe that it ever even happened now. It feels like an entirely different time period in a way. Colleges, shops, everything just shut down. Well, not hospitals of course.”

I wanted to ask something, but seeing how pensive he was, the words froze in my mouth as I felt that it was better to let him speak.

“I was a nurse during that time, of course, and you wouldn’t believe how things changed overnight,” he said. “The hospital was always full, with the Emergency Room packed with people waiting for a bed. Every single hour there would be a rapid response because someone was desaturating and needed to be intubated. Or someone had a cardiac arrest. We were always short-staffed and several people I worked with tested positive and had to be quarantined. There was a point when we almost ran out of masks, if you can believe it.” He sat down and sighed. “I certainly can’t, even after I lived it.”

“Did it get better?”

“I mean, of course it did,” he said. “Pandemics can’t go on forever. So things quieted down and things are back to ‘normal’ I guess. But it never really made sense. The whole thing didn’t make sense from start to finish. Someone’s ninety-year old grandmother could have the disease and have no symptoms at all- with it just coming positive on the test while they were doing fine during quarantine. And in the next room, a forty-year-old man who was otherwise healthy has to be intubated and placed on a ventilator, and then passes away two days later.” The way he spoke about it was the way I think veterans would speak about a war they had fought long in the past.

“I-I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, sitting next to him. “I do miss out on things being stuck here, there are a lot of historic events I have no idea about.”

He chuckled. “I wish I had no idea about it. But yeah, it’s over now.”

“Is… is that why you quit nursing?” I asked him.

He fiddled with his hands, and for a moment I thought that I had asked something too personal, but he answered, “No, it wasn’t that. It was something that happened… later. Something went wrong, really wrong with a patient. I don’t think I even want to go into more detail than that, but… after that, I didn’t want anything to do with my old job anymore.” He went to go grab a drink. “But, hey, I guess that just means I really appreciate this boring job now.”

A part of me wanted to ask if that was also what had caused him to break off his engagement with Josephine (or was it her who had broken it with him? She had returned the ring, so that was more likely) but then, another part of me didn’t want to hear anything about him being with someone else. And, it seemed the topic of his ex really upset him, so I held off despite my curiosity.

If Charlie wanted to talk about Josephine - he would. He hadn’t, or at least, he had talked about her as little as possible, which made it seem like he wanted to forget her. And if that was the case, I might be shooting myself in the foot by asking him to remember her over and over again.

But I couldn’t help myself, a part of me was deathly curious about her - even more so than what his old job was like. Yes, it was irrational, but I couldn’t help myself. “Well, I don’t have any problem with you going out, of course, you want to be with your friends once in a while.”

“Right, thanks,” he said.

What I didn’t say was how much I wanted to join in, not necessarily with this, but with things in the future. Would that be possible? With cameras it might be, but only if everyone knew about me and even then it would be very awkward.

I cursed the state of my being again as I poured over the materials he had brought for us to look over, looking for answers and if possible a way to turn me back.

Nothing came - that old book that was in German went from Buddhist philosophy to describing the theological underpinnings of practices around the worship of Ma’at, a deity in Egypt, but never seemed to say anything of practical substance.

I couldn’t even begin to understand what the ultimate point of the author was supposed to be, and neither could Charlie even after we had read nearly a quarter of the pages in the book.