Beneath the music from a farther room
As the elevator moved at some unknowable speed in an undeterminable direction, Gradie was only half there, the rest of him still watching Lucy turn over his childhood bedroom, looking for something they were both afraid to find. Michael had been talking, but most of his words slipped by Gradie unnoticed.
“Now that you're on the team, we need to cover some basics. Under no circumstances will you let anyone in the Otherworld know that you are a Hardworlder. Do you understand?”
“Why?”
“Because competition between Hardworlding teams is fierce, and anonymity is our most prized asset. Its the same reason EP was wearing a mask when I picked you up. It’s difficult to change your appearance much when you drop into a Hardworld, and the last thing you want is the other side knowing who to look for.”
Even if Gradie’s head wasn't spinning from being sliced open like a bag of receipts by some interdimensional spiritual skip tracer, he wouldn’t have followed what Michael meant, but he nodded anyway.
“Good,” Michael said. The elevator stopped moving, as if it had been waiting for him to finish speaking, and they stepped out into a hallway.
If Gradie had to guess, they were somewhere behind a mall, or deep in the back hallways of a stadium. Rain fell outside the walls, beat on the doors, and struck chimes on something metal above the ceiling. Thunder rumbled, soft and even as the carpet.
“EP, have the team head to the clubhouse,” Michael said. EP nodded like she had been assigned a killing and marched out a door.
“See you around,” Gradie called after her, but his words snagged on the carpet and got slapped around by the rain. She didn’t even look back. The muted roar of the Allcity spilled out the door and snapped off as it closed.
“What’s the Clubhouse?” Gradie said.
“It’s in the Hardworlds.” Michael moved down the hall.
“We’re going back there?”
“Yes. But not we. You’re gonna go on your own and I’ll meet you there.” Michael went through a door and Gradie followed.
It was just a normal hotel room, but it felt like so much more. For a moment, Gradie felt there might not be any of that quality that made the Allworld feel so ethereal. But as his mind adjusted, he felt on the edges some of that softness, like the instability in a dream, and like that feeling when he stopped looking it, his mind forgot it and everything seemed perfectly real.
“What is this?”
“A Fragment.”
“What?”
“A piece of the Otherworld so well crafted that it's almost indistinguishable from the Real.”
“Is that what Lucy uses?” Gradie froze, afraid his past would start spilling out again.
“No. That place uses your own mind, like a parabolic mirror for your memory.”
“So why are we here? I thought the Hardworlds were outside the Otherworld.”
“It’s easier to visualize the Hardworlds in a place like this, and in order to get to the Hardworlds, you have to know what they are.”
Gradie dragged his mind back before his time with Lucy, and tried to remember what Michael had told him in the story. It felt like ages ago.
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“You said they’re like an alternate reality.”
“Right. So how would you get there?” A crystal decanter and cup set, complete with an old-fashioned seltzer bottle, stood out of place on the laminate desk, next to a flesh-toned cord phone. Michael poured a drink like he expected this to take a while. Gradie, still shaken from what Lucy had done, wanted to get on with it, to jump headfirst into whatever terror came next. It was the in between places that he couldn’t stand. He felt they could trap him forever.
“A door,” Gradie said. It was how they got everywhere else.
Michael pulled the black-out curtains aside and the rain got louder. The daylight was a soft grey, like glowing concrete.
“You have to stop thinking of moving from one place to another as a physical event. Travel in the Otherworld, even to the Hardworlds, is a journey of the mind.” Michael sat down and got comfortable, the son of a bitch.
“So how do I move my mind?” Gradie shifted his weight to one leg. The gravity here was constant. Dead. The gravity of the Allworld seemed alive, even mischievous, in his memory. Michael shifted in his seat.
“I’m going to be honest, Gradie. This is my first time working with someone who didn’t already know how to get in. I’m trying to think of the best way to explain it.”
Gradie sat down on the bed. For a moment, the bounce of the mattress, the shadows of the furniture, the aseptic smell of the room, so like every other hotel room he had ever been in, jumped out of place and became part of a wider world of highways and people and paychecks. Then it was all alone again, encased by the sound of the rain, floating in a universe of nothing else.
“How did it feel to be in a Hardworld?” Michael asked suddenly. Gradie saw the gas station. It was hard to believe it had been a Hardworld. All the times Michael or Lucy had mentioned them, they sounded like some mythical place, not a dingy counter and flickering fluorescence. The feeling of being there returned to him.
“Like dreaming I’m someone else.”
“Right. When you enter the Hardworlds, you enter an alternate version of yourself. To do that, for the first time, you have to believe that what you are entering is real, and if it’s real, then all of this—” Michael spread his arms “—is just a dream.”
“So, what? I have to convince myself I’m dreaming?”
“Yes. And then you have to wake up.”
Gradie waited for Michael to smugly explain why it wasn’t that simple. He didn’t.
“Are you ready to try?”
“What’s the catch?”
Michael smiled.
“You think waking yourself up will be easy?”
“I’ve woken up from this place before.”
“Yes, but not by choice, right? Why do you wake up?”
“I get tired.” It was the best way to describe that pulling feeling that had brought him amnesiatically back to his real life.
“Why? You think you have a body to get tired?”
“Then what would you call it?”
Michael shrugged. “Maybe your spirit here is a kind of reaction, like a flame or a current, and it needs to return to the real to recharge.”
“Can you just tell me what I need to know?” Gradie was sick of Michael's vagaries. At least with Lucy, things were absolute. ‘Either do this or fuck off.’ Her eyes floated up in his memory, and he found himself missing her.
“You should relish this, Gradie. After a while, you’ll have your own theories about this place, and you’ll be stuck with them forever.”
Gradie had nothing to say to that. Michael sighed and continued.
“Let me ask you this, does your life in the Real feel more real, from where your standing now, than anything else?”
“Yes.”
“Does it? Really?”
Gradie thought about his apartment, his job, and it all blended with the life in the gas station.
“No. What the fuck? It’s just like the other one.” He felt his real life slip away and melt into the other one, and he grabbed on to it in panic, ran his memory over every part of it, rescuing it.
“What did you just do?”
“What?”
“You clung to it, your real life, didn’t you?”
“What, are you in my head?”
“No, I’ve seen it happen before, a lot. I did it when I first started. Everyone does.” Michael took a drink and swirled it in the glass, watching it like was telling him something. Gradie recovered himself, and thought of something.
“Wait, then how did Lucy dig through my real life? I never even thought of that other me in there.” Despite the agony of having someone else dig through his soul, he had never had this crisis of identity when Lucy had her eyes fixed on him. Again, he missed them.
“She’s an expert at drawing out the real you. But, the magic of the Otherworld is that here, you get to decide who the real you is. You made a choice, just now, to cling to that version of yourself.”
Gradie was silent as Michael's words settled in his mind. Wasn’t this what he had always wished for? A way to get away from himself?
A gentle thunder rolled outside. Michael spoke in the silence that followed.
“Do you understand what you have to do?”
“I have to let it go.”
“Yes. Here in the Otherworld, you are equidistant from all the lives you could ever live. Once you accept that what you know as the Real is just another dream, your mind will seek out something real. You must open your mind and wake up into that other life. That’s how you get to the Hardworlds.”
He stood up. “And either you can do it, or you can’t.”