For the third time in as many minutes, John doubled over and retched into the bowl. It spattered mostly into the water, though stray chunks speckled the porcelain and nearby wall, further defiling the already filthy bathroom. Since his return to his apartment, he had done nothing but hover over the toilet to get the demons out. Unsurprisingly to John, he had a lot of demons.

When his guts finally calmed down, John spat perfunctorily into the toilet and stared down into his own sick, hands on his knees.

The blur of his vision had diminished, and now instead of looking at the world as though underwater, he looks at it through a moderately smudged window. His headache, on the other hand, had not diminished even a little. In fact, it may have gotten worse. His temples throbbed in and out so painfully he wondered if the skin was distending like a frog’s throat. Worse, in addition to this more traditional headache, his scalp stung like someone was continually running a scalpel across it in random patterns.

Not bothering to flush the toilet, John staggered to the sink, essentially transferring his hands from his knees to the countertop to support his unsteady bulk. Sensing the grotesquerie a moment before he saw it, John looked up into the mirror and forced himself to confront what he was. The eyes of mirror John were dull and unfocused. They were red with tears, many of which had trailed through his patchy beard to pool near his chin. They glared back with apathetic malignment as if too exhausted to hate the pathetic loser they saw.

Worse, by far, was his hair. John knew it would be bad, but as he traced the angry, pink patches of hairless scalp disfiguring his hair, which has now burned away to a third of its previous size, he felt the tethers of something inside him snap away.

John was a loser. He was the loser. He had just proven it by making a complete ass of himself to the only people on this planet who even pretended to give a shit about him anymore. He had shamed them by showing up fat and unwashed. He had embarassed them by fucking up a simple game of charades. He had closed the door on ever having a meaningful relationship with any of them ever again by telling them all to fuck off. John was completely, and utterly alone.

He had even called his mother a cunt.

She deserves better than you, said the voice at the back of his mind. She’s always deserved better than you.

As John floated back to the living room, pulling off his sweater and absently stepping through lumps of dirty landry, he noticed something was clutched in his hand. Ignoring it, he fell into the couch. He stared dumbly at the black television screen, mind unquietly blank. After a good while, though John could not say how long because all concept of time has fled, he stuffed what he was holding into a pocket and turned on the television. He picked up the controller.

The winter forest of Uldwyld appeared. Its evergreen trees stood lean and tall among the gently drifting snow, which fell through the air to add itself to the thick layer already carpeting the ground in white. Except, that was not what was happening, was it? The snowflakes were pixels on a screen. They were ones and zeros coded into a machine. They didn’t fall to the earth and gather because the game wasn’t that complicated. The level of snow was fixed. It was not real weather. The pixel-flakes fell to the pixel-ground and disappeared like they never existed. Because they never had existed.

None of it was real.

Tears fell anew as John pushed the movement stick forward, moving his fake character further into the fake forest. A crumbling stone structure appeared. It was like a strange, ancient house caved in at one corner. Finally, he had reached the outskirts of the Uldwyld Ruins.

With a grit of his teeth, John decided it didn’t matter that none of it was real. Right now, and maybe always, Nordic Runes was all he had. It might be pathetic, and it might be the most worthless existence a human being could possibly have - pretending to be a god to fake people in a fake world while being nothing on the outside - but it was still something. It was something. Right now, that was all John needed. He needed something to hold onto.

Angry shouts could be heard outside. A man’s voice, hostile and hot, tandem to a woman’s that edged between pleading and outrage. John knew each of those voices well, individually, but he also recognized the familiar duet. He ignored it and focused on Nordic Runes. John was nothing now, so these people were nothing to him.

You are less than nothing, John Robbie. Far less. Nothing has no effect, but your very existence harms.

With a splintering bang the door burst inward, colliding with the wall and rattling to an uneasy stop. Gerald Robbie stood at the threshold. His hair was wild on one side, as though driven upward with a forceful comb, and his eyes burned with animal rage. The Jingle Balls! sweater that had looked so fun and festive before now looked utterly psychotic. Something bulged from a pocket of his slacks.

“You feel like a big man now?” he asked through clenched teeth. “You feel like a big man calling your mother a cunt? Huh? Answer me!”

John looks at his father, whose hateful glare should have obliterated him into microscopic pieces… but the fear refused to come. The man who had intimidated John his entire life, and who now looked ready to murder him, drew almost nothing from his emotions. The emptiness was too profound.

Loud sobs were coming from somewhere outside.

“Look at you,” his father said with contempt. “You don’t even give a damn, do you? Why don’t we just set aside everything I’ve sacrificed for you, you ungrateful little shit, and think about what the woman you just called a “cunt” has done for you, shall we? She gave you a place to stay when you flunked out of school. She’s given you tens of thousands of dollars to support your useless lifestyle because you can’t hold a job. She tried to get you therapy, she tried to get you medication and she won’t tolerate anybody saying a single critical word about her precious son. And how do you repay her?”

John stared blankly at his father, dimly aware that he seemed to want some kind of reaction. John just couldn’t find one to give. What was the point.

“Christ, you really don’t care, do you? I’ll tell you how. You slap her while she’s trying to help you, you tell her you don’t love her and you call her a cunt. Then instead of apologizing like a man you come back up here to your sad little hole and play this FUCKING GAME!”

Gerald Robbie’s voice became a scream as he ripped John’s game system away from the wall and wheeled around, looking at John once more to savor the moment before hurling the device out into the night. It crashed onto concrete somewhere in the distance. His mother’s sobs redoubled.

“This is how it’s going to go,” John’s father said, the heat in his eyes having cooled with catharsis, but into something no less hostile. “Since money seems to be the only thing you care about, I am going to pay you to leave here and never come back.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He reached into his pocket and then flung his arm forward. The bundle in his hand fanned out into a cloud of spinning green bills, spreading out like confetti above the garbage and filth of John’s living room. The way they drifted to the carpet reminded John of the snow in Uldwyld forest. Uldwyld. Nordic Runes. John can’t go back there now.

“That’s two thousand dollars. Take it, pack your shit and get the fuck out of here. I’m through with you. If I come back tomorrow morning and you’re still here, I’m calling the police.”

He slammed the door behind him, though it was no longer capable of closing so it rattled back to leave a sliver of the outside night.

His mother’s sobs receded, as though moving away towards the house, and then vanished entirely.

As John sat in the silence of his father’s absence, his one escape from himself now scattered into broken pieces on the pavement outside, he became one with the apartment. He was no longer distinguishable from it. John was one more piece of garbage among the rest, usefulness long ago expended, destined to decompose in stillness until finally thrown away.

Absently, his hand emerged from his pocket with a pill bottle.

Effexor XR 37.5 mg 2 x day

60 count

Tonight, John had ruined any chance he had at redeeming himself to his family. Now, they would always hate him. He was alone. Moreover, he no longer had a home, and without a job, the two thousand dollars his father had tossed at him will only last a few months, at best. He could buy another game system, and he could rent a hotel and go back into the world of Nordic Runes, and he could buy food and drinks and pretty soon the money would dry up. John was too incompetent and lazy to hold a job, so once that money was gone, there was no more.

Doing anything, literally anything at this point was only delaying the inevitable. The truth was finally sinking in. Tonight, when he burned every rickety bridge he had left, John finished it. He threw his own life away.

He watched the pills with odd detachment as they piled onto his palm. A few of them danced off and tumbled into his lap, but it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t need all sixty. For a while, he just stared at that pile, almost as though seeing if it would change or vanish somehow. Eventually, however, its reality became undeniable. Fluid. John didn’t have anything to drink.

He took a quarter-full bottle of Rolling Rock from the coffee table, pushing cans and burger wrappers to the floor. It wouldn’t taste good, but that was fitting in its way. Nothing about John’s life had tasted good. It was all been bitterness and disappointment, embarrassment and shame. Nothing he had done had ever amounted to anything, and no one he had known ever walked away better than they were before. He had only failed. He was only failure. He was a mistake.

As John willed his hand to move, initiating the process that would finally correct the mistake of himself, another feeling pushed against the despair. It was a feeling of dissonance, like an incorrect note had been struck among an otherwise consistent melody. Something about this was wrong. John hated himself for hurting the people in his life, so how did causing them more pain solve that problem?

They’ll get over it, whispered the voice at the back of his mind. They’ll be better off. Even your mother will forget about you in a month.

No.

No, this wasn’t the way.

John turned his hand over, letting the pills cascade over the edge of the couch cushion like a waterfall. He may have been nothing, and he may have had nothing, but he wouldn’t be responsible for any more of his mother’s tears. He would figure something out, even if it meant living under a bridge somewhere for a while. And who knew? Maybe things would get better for him some day. John didn’t know the future any more than anyone else does, no matter how hopeless things might feel. All he could do right now was move forward.

As John began to collect the crumpled fifty-dollar bills scattered across his living room, something strange caught his attention. His television screen. When his father had ripped the gaming system chord out of its port the tv went black, but now it was active again. It showed something it could not show. A winter forest. Drifting snow and evergreen trees were illuminated in red light, a full, yellowish moon looming above in a star-filled night sky. It was Uldwyld. it was Nordic Runes.

At the same time, though, it wasn’t. The scene on John’s television was no video game. It was real. It was a real place. The bark of the trees, the chaotic patterns of snow, the heavily cratered moon and twinkling stars - they struck John’s eyes as tangible objects. No video game had come close to achieving that level of realism. Besides, John’s game system was gone. Just what the fuck was going on?

Maybe John had hit his head even harder than he realized. Holding his breath, John took the controller and eased the movement stick forward. The forest moved smoothly past as though John was traveling through it. Was he imagining this? Or had he imagined his father storming in and chucking his game system to the pavement? A broken chord hung limp from the television, connected to nothing, and when he peeked out the door, the pieces of his thoroughly destroyed gaming system littered the driveway behind Vanessa’s Subaru.

Was this what insanity felt like? Was a psychotic break just a perfectly normal-seeming experience of incredibly wrong phenomena? Oh look, that guy just took off his people mask and he’s actually a reptile person. Hey, the Jesus on my crucifix just whispered that I should broil the cat. Would you look at that, my television started displaying a hyper-realistic video game with no inputs connected to it whatsoever.

Unable to shut the door normally because his father’s kick broke the frame, John nudged over a pair of blue jeans on the floor to block it closed. A thick, three-ring binder rested on the chest of drawers beneath the television. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression. John picked it up and pulled open the heavy flap, revealing a title page printed on clean, white paper. He flipped on, glancing at the different sections and noting how normal and not crazy the text inside appeared. At least he wasn’t totally losing it.

Hoping to find something related to his current hallucinations, he scanned down a list of “cognitive distortions.”

Cognitive Distortions

All or Nothing Thinking - You see things as absolutes with no gray areas.

Example: My life is a complete failure.

Negativity Bias - You notice all of the negatives, but you fail to notice any of the positives.

Example: My annual evaluation at work was absolutely terrible because my boss criticized my punctuality and attention to detail.

Mind reading - You make assumptions about what other people are thinking, and you typically assume their thoughts about you are negative.

Example: Matthew probably thinks I’m an idiot after I told that stupid joke.

Catastrophizing - You expect the worst, mentally escalating minor problems into major catastrophes.

Example: This mild pain in my chest is probably a heart attack, and I’m not going to get to the hospital in time.

Labeling - You apply negative labels to yourself and innacurately ascribe yourself with negative traits.

Example: I struggle with motivation sometimes, so I am lazy.

John found almost all of these “cognitive distortions” applied to the way he thought, but none of them explained why he was seeing things on his television that shouldn’t be there. As he continued down the list, a red glow fell over the page.

When he looked up, the loose hold John had maintained on reality finally slipped away. In the middle of his living room, between the coffee table and the television, floated an oval of crimson light. Hovering several inches above the carpet, it was slightly taller than John and about one-and-a-half times as wide. Its surface swarmed with particles of bright, red static.

On the television, amidst the snow of Ulwyld forest, a matching portal had appeared.

The binder in John’s hand began to disintegrate before his eyes, its remnant dust being drawn into the chaotic light of the living room portal. He realized in horror that the fingers holding the binder had also begun to break apart. His arms went next, then his torso. The quiet destruction ate into his neck, and his face, and then, as though he has been thrust into the heart of a red star…

John’s world flared crimson.