Spheres

It is a NPC, a nonplayable character, with a salt-and-pepper shag just shaggy enough (neckline is our ballpark guess) and cotton sleeves with an adequate amount of wrinkles to preclude us from casting a curious glance at the face, in which case he might have become real. FIFA ’09 and Resident Evil 4 taught us that the only real characters were those controlled by our hands, whom we selected before the start of the game. All others were nonplayable, imaginary, unaccredited with the complexities and intricacies of our own endless interior monologues. The passages of Paris thus became a pixellated land of Ares and Are-Nots (which side of the 55% divorce rate did each passerby land on?) but because it held us, included us, we accepted it as real.

Unable to distinguish between pixel and atom, we saw NPCs everywhere. There they sat on the metro with their salt-and-pepper hair, then at our university’s only cafe, across the windowless classroom in the same plastic chairs as us. We’d see them in the same places at predetermined hours, governed by a predetermined etiquette that taught us when and how to speak.

Their only proof of life came from the pixellated prism in our back pockets that proved life happened to them, that allowed them to access a voice: the personal shrines bellowing throughout our churches. Morning, evening, and night, we pulled out our Bibles and scrolled our prayers. Oh, did we fear the Lord. Restless fingers babbled: God exists I clicked on it.

On a Tuesday in March 2022, we sat beside two NPCs and booked the cheapest car and lodging to be found on airbnb.com. Such criteria directed us to Vernassal, a commune of 357 people about two hours southwest of Lyon. The ordeal was startlingly devoid of research, a little desperate, perhaps, and over in about ten minutes.

The nature of our journey expressed reasonable desires and expectations:

(You see, the day we left home for the first time, our beds became a pyre. A part of us went up in flames every time we laid back on it).

○ We needed to burn in an open field.

● Sartre was right—we were leading a toothless life. We had never bitten into anything. We were waiting. We were reserving ourselves for later on—and just noticed that our teeth were gone.

● Damp rain.

● Freedom from the marketplace.

○ America’s number one export is our culture.

■ to be recycled stardust with nothing to offer the market but a smile and a wave

● A ripe peach whose juice could fill our toothless mouths.

● A place to observe children

○ Probably not raise them

■ We feared our parents had children to inoculate their lives from futility

■ Overpopulation

● The color green again.

As we traversed the A71 highway in an automatic red Peugeot—we never learned how to drive stick shift—past mothers teaching their toddlers how to woodwork and fish, we thought about our parents’ Teslas with the ability to play Mario Kart. We’d sit in the driver’s seat of a machine whose mechanics were intentionally otherworldly to us, whose creator was about to trade his car for a rocket. While he flew to the moon, we’d zoom through our electric earth with electric gas—not covered by insurance, of course. We discovered that we could trade this world for another, that it was possible to descend into planes where the only impact we had was not impacting anyone. This interchangeability of spheres diffused into the belief that everyone around us was less real than we.

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In honor of our limited attention spans, a brief interlude on the topic of we and us:

● The we-ness of this we wrestles in the W’s zigzagged maze, shoots out of the top right corner and launches us into the mouth of the E. As we rattle from rung to rung, we wonder: are we a we because we are a market, and

● who is not here?

○ This “us” is comfortably ambiguous; we hide behind it, for any flaws of mine can be reasonably misinterpreted as another’s.¹

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In the French capital of lentils, no one was not there.² Greens greened. We waved at flocks of sheep en route to a waterfall and waded cautiously into her basin. The endeavor revealed

● we have toes.

○ They skirmished with glee, their submergence a baptism.

● kissing in the dirt.

○ Dirty just means out of place.

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¹ When did us become so afraid of “*” ?

² except war

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● dogs are infinitely better than cats

○ To cat owners, we ask: would your feline chase a waterfall?

The ethos of the trip was patience. Dinner never occurred before 21h. During the hour that the dried mushrooms simmered on low heat, we flipped over all one thousand pieces of a puzzle on the shelf. Rumbling stomachs that twice realized an hour too late that the only market closed at 17h took notes from Paco, to whom we were the non-playable characters. Day and night, the Great Pyrenees sat on the deck, paws straight ahead. The good boy just sat there, exempt from hunger it seemed, with a certain movement in stillness that mimicked the invisible *’s within our we.

Hunger was sobriety. Leftover potatoes and aubergine on open fields of grass—who told us we needed any more than this, and when did we believe them? Patience, we found, was not the ability to wait. It was how we waited, an attitude so unruffled that none could tell whether or not we were waiting.

As the Peugeot crept back into Paris, we wondered: can we live inside this regime of the human and still exceed it?

The car arrived and we unpacked our bags. We unbuckled our seatbelts, got outside, hopped onto our bikes, adjusted the handlebars, rolling from the sidewalk onto the pavement where sprouts grew between the cracks. Feeling warm from the fingertips down to our feet on the pedals, we wiggled our toes, entered the world once more, rode down the concrete jungle past the Haussmannians full and empty of people, we saw the mailman, smiled.

He waved back at us.

Michelle Reilly is a sophomore transfer at USC (Comparative Literature and Mathematics student) endeavoring to share her work for the first time. This creative nonfiction essay was inspired by Annie Ernaux’s The Years, wherein she experiments with “we” over “I” in a radical autobiography of her country.