Grayspace

Day Zero

"I just made you up to hurt myself. And it worked." - NIN

"You're just not what I'm looking for!" she blurted out and stomped off, tossing the back of her hand over her shoulder as if a phantom brick would smack Cam in the face.

He had to bite back the obligatory That's not what you said last night. And he would have been telling the truth. It wasn't what she said last night. But she wouldn't remember what she said. It was part of the construct. She was crazy about him for a few days until the arrangement of the construct began to degrade.

It should have been an easy fix. Just rearrange the construct a little neater, a little tighter. Her particular construct was locked away in the studio with the rest. A wooden doll, it's right arm wrapped with a single strand of her golden hair. God, getting that hair took a ton of patience. Did she really have to wear her coat all the time? The hood of that dull purple thing was a nest of those wavy, frizzy curls. And getting near it may as well have been like snatching her underpants.

Well it took her long enough to throw her head back in laughter one day at the diner with her friends, and one lonely strand adhered to the fabric of the booth. Cam was all over it as soon as they cleared out. Hair, check. Painting to the right of the hair, check. Handwritten narrative to the left of the hair, check. And the construct was complete. It may hold for a month or a year or five minutes. Depends on what was in the heart.

She was much more congenial the next day. She actually flirted with him the week after. A few adjustments to the construct -- An extra detail to the painting. An extra sentence to the narrative -- and she was head over heels for him.

If there was ever a chill in her hugs or she rolled her eyes more than she gazed into his, simple. Check the construct. Fix.

Cam found himself fixing her construct almost every other day. Unlike monthly at the beginning. He'd paint bright red roses in her painting one day, and find that they were dry husks in less than 48 hours. He'd write flowing, flowery love poems in her narrative and they'd degrade into nonsense right before his eyes.

He was losing her.

He woke up in the same room he woke up in for the last fourteen years. It was his first construct. The thrill of pure creation was intoxicating. He made a palace. He made a fortress around the palace. Just by painting. Just by writing.

He tried to make his own people. But they came out very.... plastic... unfinished. Adding affects from real people (hair, nails, the occasional shred of callous) to a construct created much more realistic, believable animonculi.

They largely retained the will and the personality of the people they were based on. Anything Cam didn't like was a modest change to the relevant construct away. Was she too cold? Find the construct. How'd those icicles get in the background of the painting? Paint over them with flowering vines. Was she never in the mood for a kiss? Dig out the narrative of the construct. That scene about a breakup wasn't in there before. Change it into a scene of resolving the spat. And bang, he could do whatever he wanted.

His favorite animonculus was his first lesson that once a construct fell apart, there was no putting it back together.

She was a shade of the prettiest, skinniest, most fiery little thing he had ever laid eyes on. Long flaxen hair. Dear Lord. With all that wool on her head and the way she was always tossing it around, getting a single strand was no problem at all. With each brush stroke and each finished sentence, she took shape. The way he wanted her took shape. He ironed her out to a perfect wish fulfillment. The real her would have blushed if she had known what he was doing with the shade of her.

But the shade still retained the spark of the real. The real her was fiercely independent and adverse to what he had crafted her into. He kept putting off "fixing" her construct as he focused on putting together constructs of other girls. But the day came when she would slap, spit, curse, and run away no matter what he did to what was left of her painting and her narrative. He had allowed the painting to degrade into splotches of color and the words of the narrative had melted into lines of no legibility.

He was too late. The memory of the final failure was burned into him. He spent the whole night trying to fix her construct, trying to put the flowers back in the painting and the lovely words back in the narrative. In the morning, he went to put his arms around her, and she shoved him flat on his back, marched out the palace doors, and dissolved into a cloud of moths that twisted off into random, irretrievable directions.

He spent the rest of the day and the rest of the night trying to repair her construct. Nothing came of it. She was just gone.

Cam filched many hairs and conjured many shades since then, but none of them were like her. Some came close. But none were close enough. The first go was gold.

Now he awoke in what was once a royal bedchamber with a crystal chandelier. He opened his eyes to a box of a room with peeling paint and a finely cracked light bulb swaying from a chewed cable. The grand bed had devolved into a small, sheetless mattress rank with tears, sweat, and other things.

He could have fixed the construct for the palace if he really wanted to. But want was something in him that had narrowed, becoming closer to need, obsession, and the Spartan focus it lent.

As far as girls went, he had three or four constructs left, and they were all falling apart. The true essence of the real women they were based on were taking over. His talents as a writer and painter were showing their limits. They were like fireworks. Able to mesmerize and transfix for only so long before they burned out.

They kissed less passionately. The ice in their eyes thickened when he looked into theirs.

You're just not what I'm looking for! was really just the beginning.

The redhead followed suit, enjoying his company but refusing to let him touch her.

The other three blondes would give him this look that may as well have been a syringe full of concentrated guilt whenever he tried to put his arms around them.

Eventually, they all left their crumbling bedchambers for the sunny meadow beyond the stub of a tower the palace crumbled into.

Cam was too pathetic to let them just go. Especially the redhead. She came pretty close to what he had at first. As she disappeared into the field of fat ears of corn and he raced behind, he hit a patch of snowfall in the summer afternoon. That was his first hint that things were really out of shape. The leaves and the stalks of the field had gained a sheen of frost by the time he gave up looking for her. He sighed a billowing cloud of resignation and headed back. He couldn't keep them, but he could keep this world... maybe..

No.

The sun set. He got to work in the studio. Not only did his adjustments to the constructs yield nothing, the sun didn't rise. The clocks crept closer and closer to noon, but the sky was a solid midnight. The vegetation of the summer meadow didn't just ice over. It vanished. And a bitter cold stole into the studio.

Cam shook his head and took another wooden doll out of storage. He didn't have much hair left, but he found one long enough to lodge in a joint of the faceless thing's neck. The narrative he wrote was depressing, to say the least. The painting was of his own chest, and he placed a gray brick in the space where a heart should be.

The snow fell. The ice accumulated. But he didn't feel any of it.