Just like clockwork, a new student arrived the next day. His face, clothes, voice, his entire existence annoyed me. I avoided looking at him out of fear that I would suddenly feel an impulsive urge to bash his head into the wall. I couldn't explain the reason for it, not even to myself, but a big part of me started to blame the "newbies" for the situation I was in.
The expected question came sometime around noon.
"Can you show me around the school?" the new guy asked.
I ignored him and kept looking out the window.
"Are you deaf?" he asked.
I didn't react to that either. It was for the best if he considered me deaf, blind, or even non-existent.
However, this guy turned out to be much more obnoxious than his predecessors. He followed me around at every step. I couldn't even go to the bathroom without him breathing down my neck. At some point, I actually started looking forward to his imminent death.
After a week of this harassment, I decided to give myself a break. Instead of going to school that day, I went to hang out at the city library. It was warmer to sit there than aimlessly roam the city streets. Besides, I wanted to look up some books that I vaguely remembered reading but couldn't recall the contents of.
I randomly picked "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and sat down in the brightly-lit reading room. However, I was in for a nasty surprise.
The book was entirely unintelligible. The pages seemed to contain letters and words, but in reality, it was just an imitation of printed script. It reminded me of that note filled with gibberish I once attempted to keep as proof of a "newbie's" existence.
I haphazardly leafed through the entire book and didn't find a single word I could read. Somewhat nervously, I walked towards the bookshelves and started opening one book after another.
Gibberish.
Every single one of them.
But it couldn't be. I had a clear memory of reading some of those books in school, even during class. I would have noticed such a strange thing before, wouldn't I?
On the other hand, I grew increasingly unsure of my memories and my perception of reality.
I took out my school textbooks to check if something had happened to them. But those books actually contained human-readable text. I got a headache. This whole thing didn't make any sense.
I ran out of the library and went on a bookshop tour. What I discovered shocked me. Not only were all the books filled with meaningless squiggles, but even the newspapers and magazines made no sense if one looked closer.
By the end of the day, I concluded that the only readable texts available to me were outside advertisements, titles, internet websites, and school books. I had never noticed this before, but I still wasn't sure if it was a recent development or not. I rubbed my temples, sighed, and looked for the Tom Sawyer book on the web, thinking that maybe I had read it online before and just misremembered holding an actual printed book in my hand.
I found nothing. There were zero matches for my search. I changed the search engine and still ended up with nothing.
I spent at least a couple of hours typing famous classics into the search engine and coming up empty. There weren't even any reviews or discussions on these supposedly famous works anywhere. Searching for authors only led me to social media profiles of people who shared the same name as the writer I was looking for.
Desperately, I typed in "most famous books ever," and that's when the weird gibberish appeared again. Not only was the text warped, but even the supposed depictions of book covers also looked like AI-generated nonsense that could be mistaken for a coherent image only from a distance.
I cursed under my breath and decided to switch my attention to movies and videos. They couldn't be faked so easily, right?
I looked for a famous blockbuster online, one I was sure I had watched. It was about superheroes fighting evil and destroying the Earth in the process. To my surprise, I found the movie pretty quickly on a legitimate video platform. This gave me hope that maybe the curse only affected the written medium.
Unfortunately, as soon as I pressed "play," I realized how wrong I was. All I could see was static. And all I could hear was static.
I tried several movies and TV shows, and the result was always the same - squiggly black-and-white waves instead of visuals.
Not willing to give up just yet, I headed to the nearest cinema. I mean, there were days when video platforms had technical difficulties. Maybe this was all just an unfortunate coincidence.
I chose the most popular movie, so the cinema hall was full to the brim. First, I sat through a bunch of ads. Normally I would have been annoyed by that, but today, seeing something other than static on the screen made me truly happy.
Alas, my happiness wasn't meant to last long.
As soon as the movie began, the screen randomly switched into "squiggly line mode." I looked around and realized that nobody else seemed to have noticed. Their eyes were glued to the screen as if they were really watching an exciting movie. At some moments, the audience would even laugh in unison. It was like a creepy mass hypnosis.
I wondered about all the previous times I went to see a movie. Had I also been under hypnosis and couldn't see the reality of what was happening? Or was I currently going through some kind of psychotic break, and all I perceived right now was a weird hallucination?
But do insane people ever ask themselves if they are insane?
I sat through the entire farce, hoping to find some answers. In the end, all I did was creep myself out even more. As I walked out, I heard people rave about the movie and gush about the good-looking actors.
It was unreal. In every sense of the word.
Defeated and entirely confused, I actually went to school the next day. I had no strength or desire to investigate this further. I thought I had reached a proverbial dead end.
To my great displeasure, the previous "newbie" was still alive and kicking. During lunch, he came up to me yet again and directly asked if I could take him to the roof.
"My name is Jason, by the way," he said with a broad smile.
"You have no idea how much I don't care about your name," I sighed. By that point, I was so tired and annoyed by all the things that didn't make sense that I grabbed Jason by the front of his shirt and dragged him out of the classroom. I kicked him up the ladder leading to the school roof. And once we were there, I pushed him towards the ledge.
He gave me a weird look.
"What are you staring at?" I exclaimed. "Weren't you the one who wanted to come here? Happy now? You are welcome to jump off at any point. Don't let me hold you back. Isn't that what you wanted?"
Jason rubbed his forehead. "So, is this the right path?"
"Are you asking me?" I sneered.
"Well, you're the guide. Aren't you supposed to know?"
Of course, this guy didn't make any sense.
"I don't know anything. Leave me alone," I snapped and was about to leave when he grabbed me by the elbow.
"I'm just looking for a way out," Jason gave me a sincere look. "I want to be like Brian."
As soon as Brian's name was mentioned, my breathing quickened. Somehow, even without consciously thinking about it, deep down, I knew that Brian was the alpha and the omega for me.
"Is he alive?" I asked, my hands damp and clammy from anxiety.
"Why wouldn't he be?" Jason shrugged.
My life wasn't hopeless, after all. I quietly rejoiced.
"So you've seen him? You've been outside this city?"
He seemed confused.
"Of course, I've only moved here recently."
His answer made me unbelievably excited. "Which city are you from?"
"Hm... what was it? Ah, it doesn't matter. It's up there, in the north," he waved his hand impatiently.
I looked him right in the eye, placing both my hands on his shoulders. "Can you... can you take me back with you to your town, so I can meet Brian again? Even if it's at the North Pole. I don't care."
The guy frowned. "You mean I need to go back? No, there is no way back. I can only go forward."
"What do you mean?" I was even more confused than usual.
"It's just common sense," Jason retorted. "The way out is somewhere here. I'm just not quite sure where exactly. I thought you'd be able to tell me."
I looked down, remembering Brian's contorted and bleeding body.
"If you jump off the roof, you will die," I told him matter-of-factly.
He laughed. "I know. I'm going to die either way. I just need to find the right way to die."
I suddenly understood that we were both talking past each other as if we were existing in different dimensions. But something told me that he was my best bet if I hoped to make sense of this mystery.
"What is your favorite movie?" I asked, changing the subject.
"Solaris, I guess," Jason was taken aback by this seemingly random question.
"Do you know what it's about?" I probed.
"Sure, I do. It's about a psychologist who goes to a space station to help the crew struggling with various types of psychosis. But things are more complicated than that."
"They always are, aren't they?" I smiled. "Do you remember who your favorite character is?"
"Why are you talking to me like I'm an amnesiac? Come to think of it, I liked the psychologist's wife. Or at least what appeared to be his wife."
I guessed that Jason had actually watched the real movie, not just an illusion of a movie. I suddenly felt slightly jealous of him.
In the meantime, he slowly approached the edge of the roof and looked down onto the concrete pavement.
"Oh well, it looks like the only way out is down," he shrugged and took a tiny step forward.
I expected to hear a thud or a scream, but everything was eerily silent. Slowly, I looked over the ledge, slightly anxious about what I was about to see.
To my surprise, there was no dead body on the ground. No blood. No trace of Jason. I was sure that if I went downstairs and asked the teacher or my classmates about him, they wouldn't remember he ever existed.
Maybe this was the right answer all along.
Death was the only way out of here.
I kept looking down, contemplating whether I was ready to make this leap of faith. With every passing minute, with every thought that crossed my mind, I felt more and more ready.
Finally, I looked down for the very last time, closed my eyes, and jumped.