As Eden predicted, the complication did nothing to make me feel better. It didn’t do anything except fill me with the desire to do it again. On subsequent runs I refused everyone’s advice and insisted on getting exactly what I wanted. It pleased me to think I was screwing with their system, forcing them to rethink their omniscient attitude. I was really going to put them through the ringer. There weren’t going to be any surprises, oh no, not like Eden’s complication. I knew exactly what I wanted.
I was being, of course, as predictable as a sunset. I paid to do it again. I had insurance money, and the brokerage accounts had rebounded, so why not? Why not blow it all playing with fire? I should have been suspicious; Turk was giving me too much leeway, wasn’t she? Letting me control every aspect of the complication. I was supposed to be getting what I needed, not what I wanted. I said I wanted to be convinced of the existence of reality as it had been explained to me. I had been told that Vik died in Tower One, and I didn’t believe it. Put me in the office so that I might believe, I said. Turk didn’t put up a strenuous argument. The staff psychologist went along, too. Maybe, I thought, it just so happened that what I wanted and what I needed were one and the same.
So I stood again in the EOD suit, waiting to be convinced that my husband had been burned, pulverized, vaporized. I was cooked and crushed and I still didn’t believe it.
Turk listened to my list of complaints, where the complication had failed to mimic reality, where it had failed metaphorically, why I wanted it louder, hotter, with the smell of smoldering steel. She made notes and passed them along to the designers. I was pleased to be in control of something.
My complication had little to do with what was happening within the firebox, but I couldn’t have possibly comprehended that at the time. All the pre-launch histrionics, all my insistence on maintaining control, asserting my agency: that was the real complication, the site of my transubstantiation. She let me run the fireball complication six times in total. I got friendly with the staff. We made slight modifications. After the third performance I no longer needed the office, the actors, the soundtrack. Just the fire and the collapse. I really thought I was making some progress. On my own terms, as they say. By the end, we were down to bare concrete and a wire frame to support the ceiling, no more vid-screen windows, and Jerome, an ex-chemist who’d worked at ILM before Turk hired him away, casually mentioned that for about a tenth of what I was paying, he could shoot me with a flamethrower and drop some reinforced asbestos tiling from a rig, and it would only take about an hour to set up. I didn’t hear sarcasm, but kindness; I felt encouraged that he understood. He saw that I was narrowing the scope of my research, and that as I gathered more information I was discarding superfluous elements of the set. Reality was collapsing beneath the symbolic. As I moved toward the truth, ornamentation was a distraction. Jerome was an excellent actor.
The firebox was not without its merits. It was there, buried beneath the ceiling, watching the flames eat the world, that I brought myself into focus. There, just for an instant, the paper-doll cutouts (me:me) aligned and my borders felt clear, definitive. For a moment I could believe that Vik had died.
In the end, a complication is nothing more than the practical application of a philosophy that substitutes one accepted reality for another. Suppose you have a computer. You exchange its hard drive for another, identical drive. The inputs processed by the identical drive are no different. Maybe there are slight improvements in processing speed; or maybe it’s a little slower. But nothing you’d really notice. Arguably, data flowing through the new drive undergoes a spiritual alteration, affecting every letter and number you type, every image you save, but are such things visible to the naked eye? And do they even matter, if you’re not looking for them? What if someone switches the hard drive without telling you?
A complication is not an escape, but an adjustment. Not an awakening, but a deeper, clarified slumber. It’s both the well and the bucket. Perhaps you drown or quench your thirst. Nothing changes or you might benefit from the placebo effect. We’re not Scientology, we’re not Freemasons or Figure Sevens. We are simply a conduit.
For a few months Turk and I saw a lot of each other. The thicket of sorrow that made my morning walk from the bedroom to the bathroom a bloody, grievous ordeal parted in places to allow me passage. Food went down without lodging on that shelf in my throat quite as often. I might have indicated to my counselors that I’d been sleeping better.
Around that time, Turk started making noises about getting old, about hoping to wind down the business. She talked about it casually, dropped hints, led me to the lake and waited for me to drink. When I asked to buy in as a partner, I thought it was my own idea. I suggested training with her for several years, and then, if all went well, I’d buy her out entirely when she was ready to pack it in.
You can pad my coffin with the money, she said.
In three years she’ll be one hundred. My contribution to the business has been minimal, mostly operational streamlining, some low-watt whisper campaigns after the ’08 crash to drum up business. Hire good people and get out of their way, that’s my motto. Everything will be fine after I’m gone.
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