A Normie's Guide To Mind-Reading | ONC 2023

Eight ∆ It's Like Connect Four

Life is a game of Connect Four where two sides try to connect with themselves and cut the other side's connection simultaneously, generating instead a quilt of haphazard interconnectedness. It's like sleep and wakefulness, or mind and body, or an internal conflict.

"Mind-reading is the same," Caleb says as he fills the forty-two holes in the black board with red and yellow coins at random. (They sprouted out of the mandala sketch once he removed his foot.) "No, Bryce, there is no randomness here."

No randomness, because the heads on the coins are abstract enough to be any one of us, any connection made is a connection with the self or other people intercepted by other people or the self; the tails blank, so if one looks at the other side of the board, it's like looking at a collage of red and amber lights while waiting for the green light to come on. But the green light doesn't exist here.

So we stare into a burning pause embellished with unflinching calls to slow down. Chaos comes to a standstill.

Jacob mewls, "This does not concern me."

Caleb laughs. "But you want a belly rub."

Jacob flips himself over and purrs to the gentle circular motions of a hand roughened by labour.

"Ay, there's the rub."

"Shut up."

Caleb sharply inhales. "Can't an old man pat a cat?"

All eyes are on me. It appears the outburst's mine.

"No more Shakespeare, okay?" I rise. Their eyes rise.

Connect Four, huh? Yeah, the four of them are very much connected. Why am I agitated out of the blue? Oh, I'm the only one with a monosyllabic name. What if the reason I'm targeted is because few people can pronounce my name right, and not because I'm some Zombie? It's easier to pronounce me dead anyway. How many days must I live with eyes on my back, on my chest, that even if I hide behind a wall, these walls may grow a bazillion pair of eyes, bloodshot by caffeine, and consume me? I'm prey. Yet here I sit with predators.

"We won't hurt you, Bryce," Li Zhi whispers.

Siti gives him the stink eye. "It's the pressure. You've always refrained from attracting attention to yourself. It's hard for you, isn't it?"

I scratch my neck and nod. Of course they have no reason to hurt me. But to go through this much pain in two days (my wound is healing, thankfully) is beyond infuriating.

"It's not about Shakespeare," I say.

"Mroof?" Jacob blinks.

"It's-"

"Go on." Siti wetted her lips. "You look pale. You should sit."

"It's-"

"Bryce!" I feel Li Zhi's strong hands on my chest as the room tilts sideways, the sofa sliding diagonally, the mandala sketch spinning and spinning and whirring, louder than the blenders at Starbucks.

What's stopping me from saying the truth? Why can't I tell them about-

"Ashes?" Caleb sweeps the floor with his hand and looks at me. "You just spat ashes."

Jacob runs over to lick the purple ashes and mews merrily. I see him go, frame by frame, as if my eyes were shooting a panorama shakily, every twitch, every rise and fall of leg, whisker, belly, tongue like a stitch of overlapping pictures.

"Stop thinking." Siti and Li Zhi lie me down on the sofa. A blue casket with its lid ajar. Am I really dying? "Whatever it was you wanted to say, don't think about it. Don't think about speaking it."