Interregnum

“Every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day…” Claire wrote, but she paused; it was far too melodramatic for her. After all, she intended for this journal to somehow survive for years, to be found by some future archeologist, to be the tome telling future societies of just how terrible the world was before some eventual revolution changed things for the better. Melodramatic was not the tone she wanted. Well, at least not too melodramatic.

“I never had a choice in life,” she muttered, scribbling down the right codes from her cipher. Her legs were going numb from sitting on the toilet; she moved herself to the wall opposite, sitting down on the little fuzzy blue bath mat. It was moist, but she ignored it. “Uh, I never had a choice,” she muttered, finishing out the dashes, glancing back and forth from her cipher and her notebook. “But no one does. We were born with the cameras. We were born…”

There was far too much she wanted to say, not just about the world, but her family, her brother, her life, and nothing seemed appropriate. How do you express the totality of existence in a few lines and dots?

Her eyes fell to the whole of her cipher; to any other person, it would appear to be Braille, or close to it: dashes and dots were arranged in seemingly random patterns, but there was order to the anarchy, and Claire prided herself on the cleverness of it. It was her one scrap of evidence that she was better than so many of the people around her. It was, for her, a light in a hurricane.

“They’re called… celebricams,” she said the word low, glancing over to the bathroom door, hoping that it didn’t hear her in the only safe place she knew. It hovered outside, waiting for her, watching, a braying wolf mocking a scared sheep. She pulled up her left sleeve: 3,129,177,289 it read in electric blue numbers on the inside of her forearm. It was getting lower. “And I hate them.”

“Claire Two!” shouted Claire’s mother, Claire, up the stairs. Claire jumped at the shrill screech. “Come down here, dinner!”

“In a minute!” she replied. “Shit.” She shut the notebook, tucking the cipher page into the small flap in the back cover; it would have to be finished later. She opened the door, greeted by the black orb with the gleaming blue eye, hovering, stalking, peering at her with numerous unknown people behind it taking in every moment of her life. Ignoring it was the only way she knew to get by with an ounce of sanity, and so she did just that: no smiling, no waving, no glances, nothing to satisfy it; it was as mundane as a single fleck of dust in the light.

Claire dropped the notebook on her bed and made her way downstairs, letting her feet fall slowly and softly so that she could hear the conversations from the kitchen. Only her mother and father were home; her brother hadn’t returned from baseball yet.

“…and so today I told that punk Jennings down in accounting, GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!” bellowed her father. “I really LAID INTO HIM, dear, you shoulda seen it! My lord, was I ON FIRE!”

His voice rattled the white door that separated the hall from the kitchen. It was impossible not to hear him speak, regardless of whether or not someone was inside the house or at the other end of the block. Every punctuation of his voice made every step she took towards the kitchen all the more difficult.

“I like to think that it was because of JUDGE RUDY’S SELF- HELP BOOKS!” he shouted once more. “That man CHANGED MY LIFE!”

Claire took a deep breath and pushed the door open. Both parents stared at her, frozen plastic smiles on people who elected to turn themselves into plastic people.

“Daughter of mine, CLAIRE TWO!” shouted her father, standing up in his usual overdone motions while glancing into his celebricam. His arms extended like a spider about to drag its prey and wrapped her in a hug where their torsos didn’t touch. Somehow, the seams in his suit didn’t stretch and break. “How was school?”

Claire shrugged.

“FANTASTIC!” he announced, holding her by the shoulders and staring into his celebricam. “It’s always good to see you CLAIRE TWO! HA!”

He walked to his wife and wrapped his arms around her; their celebricams, in a sort of rehearsed dance, moved to opposite sides so as to get a more complete view of the couple.

“My wife here is the BEST DAMN COOK I KNOW!” he said, squeezing her while staring into her celebricam. “AND THE BEST WIFE! Can you believe that she’s writing HER OWN COOKBOOK? YOWZA!”

She tittered and picked up a can next to the boiling pot and held it next to her face, partially blocking her husband from the camera’s view.

“It’s because of Klezmer’s salt!” she said, her candy-sweet voice making Claire gag. “A chef is only as good as her ingredients, and Klezmer’s salt is the best ingredient there is! Why, if I didn’t have Klezmer’s salt, I don’t know what I’d use because every other brand of salt is horrible!”

Claire’s father took a long, deep breath, smelling the entirety of whatever it was the lay beneath the boiling cauldron.

“Smells GREAT honey! Now where’s CHAD TWO?” he let go of his wife and turned, staring up at the ceiling light while holding an invisible orb in his hand, ready to wow the audience before him. It might have looked like the painting of a king if not for the overly white kitchen and insurmountable debt the family was in.

“Oh, he’s at baseball, sweetie!” Claire’s mother cooed. Like a professional spokesperson, he cocked an eyebrow at the camera and smiled.

“You know, our son is great at baseball,” he said, strolling around the kitchen while he stared only at the camera that hovered by his face. “One day he’ll be a pro using his JENSEN TRIPLEFORCE BASEBALL BAT! Sure, he strikes out a lot and makes a few errors in the field every so often, but he’s got the DETERMINATION! And the, uh,” Claire stifled a giggle as her father desperately searched for another word, “he WORKS HARD, JUST LIKE HOWARD HACKETT JENSEN THE THIRD DID WHEN HE GOT TO THE MAJORS!”

“He’ll be a star, right sweetie?” interjected his wife.

“You’re DAMN RIGHT HE WILL!”

Claire stared at her nails. One of her cuticles was sticking out, which was odd because she made sure to bite them down whenever they did so. She brought it to her mouth, unaware that her father had just sat down at the table and was staring at her.

“CLAIRE TWO!”

She twitched and nearly bit her finger off.

“What are you doing with yourself these days?” he asked, leaning his pale head on his pale hand. He would have fit right into a black and white movie. Claire shrugged.

“Going to school.”

“Ya know, back when I went to school,” he shined his fluorescent smile at his celebricam, “the ladies were ALL OVER ME! Boy oh boy, DID I HAVE SOME TIMES! Why aren’t you chasing boys, Claire Two?”

She shrugged.

“I’unno.”

Her father leaned back in his chair. With his platinum hair sticking up slightly, Claire realized that he looked like a paintbrush.

“No boys are interested in you, eh? Makes sense. I mean, LOOK AT YOU! Who would want THAT? You don’t even comb your hair or wear any Aberwell clothes, and every teen knows that they’re the SEXIEST CLOTHES AROUND! You definitely aren’t your mother’s daughter!” he said, laughing off the remark. “Now your mom, wow, LOOK AT THAT FIGURE! You could scoop ice cream with those hips! Pretty damn trim for a woman of 43, uh,” she glared at him with her fake blue eyes from over her shoulder, “I mean, 34!”

Trim with the graces of ‘Dr. Himba’s Body Works Plastic Surgery’ and plenty of botox, thought Claire.

“Ooh, thank you sweetie! We all know that some kids just turn out wrong! But I’ve been reading,” Claire bit her tongue, “Dr. Smolkenscreen’s book, How to Make Your Kids, uh, and I think he’s the best! He’s got good tips on making kids good and popular and nice, maybe you should read it, Claire Two!”

Claire offered a grimacing smirk and returned to staring at her nails, even though she heard the remark echo over and over in her mind.

“Now Claire Two,” he continued; Claire took a deep breath while she focused on the jagged edge of her nails, “there are plenty of people who, while they might look like a dog’s ass, still PUT SOME EFFORT INTO IT! Eh? Why not TRY A BIT HARDER? Maybe some guy will finally ask you TO THE PROM! Make you a REAL GIRL!”

“I loved being asked to the prom!” her mother added. “Oh, so many boys wanted to go with me, I had to see which would offer me the best, um, experience first!” Claire’s throat got tight; she closed her eyes. Words boiled inside her, just begging to be ejected in a fit of steam.

“I’m 16, there’s no prom. It’s next year. And-” she nearly mentioned that she wouldn’t go anyway, that she would rather be in a car crash than go to the juvenile’s wet dream, but she knew the statement would only elicit further questions from her parents.

“And what?” he father asked, leaning in close.

“And there’s time for…that,” she replied, not bothering to catch his artificially pale blue eyes. If not for the fact that she resembled her brother, she might have hoped she was adopted. Even then, however, she wouldn’t have the option to leave or to be free, whatever that word meant. Time and freedom were two concepts she held in conjunction, where she firmly believed that once she turned 18, she could just run off and find her way elsewhere, even if she still had the celebricam watching her every move. She always told herself that she would figure out how to destroy it at some point, as it seemed adept at surviving multiple strikes with a baseball bat and breaking through a closed wooden door.

The front door opened and slammed shut. Claire’s brother was home. His entrance was always preceded by multiple bangs, whether it was him taking his shoes off and throwing them on the floor, dropping his baseball bag, or generally stomping his way to the kitchen. In this case, he decided to do all three and swing the door open, hard. Claire paid him no mind as he stomped his way to the seat across from her, where he pouted and crossed his toothpick arms across his chest.

“Hi son!” said Claire’s father. “How was baseball today?”

“FUCKING SHIT!” he spat, slamming his fists on the table. He took off his green cap and threw it, narrowly avoiding both the celebricam in front of his face and Claire, who knew well enough to cover her face and dodge. She had only been hit twice this week. His bleached blond hair popped out, showing its true color at their roots. “Tommy Fulbon kept telling me that I suck at right field, and WHY ISN’T DINNER READY YET!”

“It’ll be ready in a moment, sweetie!”

He let out some feral cry, huffing and puffing as if he had just run a marathon.

“You always say it’ll be ready by 7, and I ran here so I could be on time for dinner, SO WHY ISN’T IT READY NOW?” his cheeks flushed and his eyes, the same shade of brown as Claire’s, were wide and angry.

“It’s 6:48,” muttered Claire, nodding at the time on the microwave.

“SHUT UP CLAIRE TWO! NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU!”

She sat back in chair and let her eyes scan her fingernails once more, thinking about how cute her brother was when he was a toddler and before he realized that acting out would get him whatever he desired.

“So son!” said her father, smiling as if he were in an advertisement for erectile dysfunction. “What happened at baseball?”

“Shut up, dad!” yelled Chad Two, before launching into his tirade. His father’s persistently smiling face didn’t break. “The coach decided to move me from right field to first base because he said I’d be better there, but I told him to go to hell!”

“That’s the spirit!” said his father. Chad Two nearly barked at being interrupted.

“But to show him what I’m made of, I played it anyway! So I grabbed one of Tommy’s gloves because he doesn’t need them because he sucks, and I played it, and the coach told me I did a good job! So then I went and told Tommy that the coach likes me better than him, and that his mom was a bitch too and that she was fucking the coach which was why he was on the team! And he cried! And then I told him that his mom didn’t even really love him because he’s such a piece of shit, and he totally believed it! I could tell! So then I went and told his mom that Tommy was saying that she was a stupid whore, and she got angry about it and started getting all crying like Tommy, but she knew it was true!”

His father clapped him on the shoulder and smirked at his celebricam.

“Attaboy, son! You always find new ways to make me proud of you!”

Claire had watched her father while her brother was exhaling verbal vomit, and the man had been practicing his smile in his celebricam the whole time. Chad Two softened at the remark and grinned, staring at the pale mannequin in admiration.

“Thanks dad. Um, you’re gonna come to my game tomorrow, right?”

“Course I am, son! Because I’m the BEST FATHER IN THE WORLD!” he raised his arms to the sky, accepting the imaginary award from his imaginary fans. Chad Two was contented in his own thoughts, smirking to himself, thinking of how he’s going to impress his father by not striking out as often as he does.

“Here it is, everybody!” chirped Claire’s mother, who then turned to her celebricam while holding the giant steaming metal pot. “I bet our Klezmer’s salt will give it just the right taste! As my mother used to say, molten benny!” She placed it on the table with a thump, sending some steaming water splashing down onto the cloth that came dangerously close to Claire. “Whoopsie!” she squeaked, turning a shade of pink. She then grabbed the smaller pot and started doling out spaghetti and sauce. With the first reluctant bite, Claire knew precisely what to expect, and carefully separated the sauce from the noodles before eating another helping. The others all ate their food with expressions of tortured enjoyment, or perhaps their taste buds had been eroded by the excessive amount of salt; it was difficult for Claire to tell.

Her eyes darted to the number on the inside of her mother’s forearm: it had moved several hundred places down. More people were watching her, though her number was still in the billions, lost among the massive pool of people who spend their lives toiling for the fame of the select few at the lowest channels. That didn’t assuage Claire’s worry; any increase for her mother was increased exposure for her.

Throughout dinner conversation, most of which involved the latest case on Detective Donald Farn’s channel, Claire thought only of her journal. She knew that it was a righteous endeavor; who was she to write something that should survive beyond her? Someone had to, was her reasoning; if she didn’t, no one else would, and the world would just wallow in its human chaos, subject to the infinite circle of mistakes and ‘accidents’ that seem to follow all of history. She had to end it, somehow; warn the future to prevent this from happening again, she thought as her celebricam orbited her, taking in her absentminded fiddling with her noodles. Strange that such a thing should contain the calmest shade of blue in its lens, like a crystal ocean to a warm island.

Sometime after dinner was over, Claire returned to the bathroom with her journal, her heart racing, her mind on the brink of an idea, while her family retired to the living room, in front of their wall-sized television, watching the latest developments of their favorite characters on The Isolated. It was a ‘documentary’ of people surviving on an island that was filled with carnivorous predators, both the animal kind and the overly dramatic romance kind. The two people on The Isolated with the best channel numbers were Justin Theroux and Hilda Battenwald, whose on-again off-again relationship in the midst of being hunted by a pack of ravenous (and purposely starved) wolves had captivated audiences around the world.

Unfortunately for both of them, that night Justin was killed by Hilda’s paramour, Mack Guggenheim, in a ‘revenge’ for ‘stealing his perfect girl.’ Mack then professed his undying love for Hilda, telling her how perfect she is and how he could never live without her. A wolf then pounced and killed Mack, drawn by the scent of Justin’s bleeding corpse that lay on the ground next to Hilda and Mack. Many viewers didn’t understand the unintended irony, and only watched as Hilda screamed while the wolf tore into Mack, whose expression was frozen on a mix of surprise and disappointment as the wolf waved his esophagus around in the air. Claire heard the screams from the bathroom, and could only remark to herself that it was likely the only time any genuine emotion had been expressed by any of The Isolated.

Her eyes moved back and forth from her cipher as she wrote every last detail that flowed from her fingers about her life. Everything she ever thought about her family, her school, her fears, all of it bled from her and dyed the paper until it covered every square inch in dashes, and then another page, and another, and another. There was a page describing her parents’ efforts to make money off of her as a baby (something they expressed disappointment with all too often), her parents’ efforts to glean some kind of endorsement deal from a company, another about how her parents continue to delve deeper into debt just to appear moderately wealthy, another about her brother’s persistent bullying of her, and so on until she stopped writing due to a hand cramp. She then realized she was thirsty, considering her mother’s food had the taste of ocean water, so she took a long gulp from the bathroom faucet and continued writing.

One thought persisted: her mother’s number had increased by a significant margin. There was some variability to the channel numbers during the day, but only on the scale of a dozen or two. Several hundred, even in the scale of billions, was worrying to Claire.

“My mother’s number increased,” she wrote, muttering to herself. “Something she’s been doing is working. Could mean increased attention for me, even if just by accident. Can’t risk it. Can’t let it happen. I don’t want to be watched, I want to be alone. I want to have my own thoughts. I want freedom. I hate my family.”

She stopped, not having written down the final few words. Though she detested them, she had never before said outright that she hated them. Whereas someone such as Audrey Hernandez threw the word around whenever she didn’t get what she wanted, Claire never did. It was too strong of a word, and to her it meant more than just the slight disappointment of not having one’s desires fulfilled. But was it true?

She wrote the sentiment.

“Is it possible to run away? Don’t know. I’ve searched online for people who have tried to destroy their celebricams, and they always turn out dead. Don’t know why. Even if I did run, my parents would call the police and a drama would unfold. I’d be the centerpiece, the mystery- ‘Where is Claire Two Reznikova?’ Even though anyone could watch my channel to see where I am. It’s the façade of it all; all the world’s a TV show, and everyone writes their own script.”

The prospect of no escape was a daunting one- her only freedom sat within the four walls of any bathroom, a panic room of porcelain, as privacy laws prevented the celebricam from entering to see a minor in the nude. These laws could be waived at 18, and it wasn’t uncommon for some to narrate their bowel movements.

This also applied to sex, whether it was between two adults or two minors, though there was a shade of gray in the law, given that the footage taken by the celebricam is uncensored. Thus, the software underwriting the channel distribution process censors what is displayed on television, while the footage that becomes instantly available online is unadulterated. It is one of the reasons Audrey Hernandez maintains the top channel spot. That, and her occasional intimate interactions with her father. The thought of Audrey Hernandez made Claire want to vomit.

“If I ever become like HER, I’ll kill myself.”

She snickered, but her eyes fell on the last three words. In them lay her solution to escape. It was the only escape, she realized, and the only way to actively have a choice in her life. After all, so many things could happen that are outside her control, but she always held her own pulse in her hands, and there were so many ways for her to do such a simple thing…

“But only if I become like her,” she added, though the weight of her thoughts held her down to the floor, still contemplating those three words. Eventually, she tucked the cipher into her notebook, stood and opened the door, not realizing that her finger was tucked between the cover and the first page as the celebricam greeted her. She glanced at it for a moment; it was always voracious, dying for her to give it what it wanted, show it something it had never seen before, but she tottered her way to her room and threw the notebook on her bed.

Her room, as she liked to call it, was a ‘collection of crap’: a few books she took out of the school library, many pens, a stuffed pink unicorn that she never touched, and her desk and computer. The neon pink walls had faded long ago to near white, and several black dots peppered the ceiling above her bed. She drew them; she imagined they were stars. There were hardly any for her to see in the real night sky.

After several minutes of stargazing, her computer chirped, notifying her of 70 new e-mails. She trudged to the computer, knowing that most of those e-mails would be spam, small companies searching for endorsement deals, e-mail blasts from other students announcing their ‘bangin-a$$ party dis wkend’ through the school’s assignment website, and the occasional picture of some guy’s penis. It was almost always, thankfully, a different penis; she had only seen the same one once or twice.

There was, however, an e-mail without a subject from a sender named ‘P.S. Eudonym.’ Claire nearly disregarded it, initially thinking some guy was getting clever in naming his genitalia, but upon a second glance, she opened it. She bolted upright, knocking her chair to the floor, nearly screaming before she clapped her hand over her mouth. She staggered in close to the monitor, blocking the celebricam’s view of the message.

In the message was a picture, cropped and zoomed of Claire’s hand holding her journal, showing just a few characters clearly visible on the page beneath her finger. Her head swiveled, trying to get a sense of where the celebricam was; upon finding it over her shoulder she jumped and nearly screamed again before hugging her computer monitor. Beneath the picture, she noticed, as her heart pounded in her eyes, was a message.

“Every second, of every” how does it continue?