Monday arrives the way Ori knew it would.
He is up before the alarm. He has been awake since five in the incremental way of someone who slept in shallow intervals and kept surfacing, checking the dark of the room as though it might have changed, finding it unchanged, going back under for another hour before surfacing again. By six he has given up on the pretense of sleep entirely and is sitting on the edge of the bed with both feet on the floor and his hands on his knees in the posture of someone preparing to do something they would strongly prefer not to do.
He showers. He dresses. He makes his coffee.
He does not check his phone.
This is a decision he made at some point in the night, not dramatically, not with any particular resolve, but simply as a practical measure. The phone is a room he cannot currently walk into without the room doing something to him, and he has things to do this morning that require him to be as intact as possible, and so he leaves the phone on the desk face down and drinks his coffee at the window and watches Vaelmund begin its Monday with the detached attention of someone observing weather from behind glass.
Kael texts at seven forty. Ori knows this because the phone lights up and he reads the preview on the lock screen without picking it up: I'll meet you at the east entrance. Seven fifty-five.
He picks up his bag. He checks that his notebook is inside it. He goes to the door and puts his hand on the handle and stands there for a moment that is longer than the physical act of opening a door requires.
Then he opens it and goes out.
The dormitory corridor is quieter than usual for a Monday morning, which means most of his floor is either still asleep or has already left, and he passes through it without encountering anyone, which he is grateful for with a specificity that he notes and does not examine. The lift is empty. The lobby is occupied by two students he does not recognize who are talking to each other with full morning energy and who do not look at him as he passes.
Outside, the Vaelmund morning is cold. October has shifted into a more committed version of itself overnight, the temperature several degrees lower than it was on Friday, the air with the particular density of a season that has stopped negotiating and begun arriving in earnest. Ori pulls his jacket closed and walks toward the east entrance of campus.
Kael is already there.
He is standing with two coffees from the good place, which means he left early enough to go there first, which means he factored in the queue, which means he planned this with a care that he will not mention and which Ori will not comment on but which lands in exactly the place Kael intended it to land. He hands one of the coffees to Ori when he arrives. He says nothing about the weekend. He says nothing about the video or the view count or the articles or the confession boy or any of the accumulated weight of the last fifty-three hours.
He says: "Cold."
"Very cold," Ori agrees.
They walk.
The campus in the early morning has its usual population of students moving between points, the clusters and the individuals and the people on their phones and the people in conversation and the people managing earphones and bags and coffee cups with the practiced multitasking of people who do this every day. Ori moves through it at his usual pace and watches it from behind the slight remove that the cold morning and the coffee and Kael's presence create, the remove of someone who is present but insulated, slightly behind the glass still.
For the first four minutes it is fine.
Then they pass the main social sciences building and it is not fine.
There are two students standing outside the entrance, a man and a woman, both in their late teens or early twenties, both in the particular kind of easy conversation that happens between people who know each other well enough to be funny in front of each other. The woman is in the middle of saying something and her posture is slightly theatrical, her head lifted, her gaze directed at a middle distance with the exaggerated sincerity of someone performing sincerity for comedic effect, and what she is saying, in a voice pitched to carry, is:
"—the specific way she tilts her head when something is genuinely funny, which is to the right, and to the left when she is about to say something she has considered—"
The man laughs. The woman continues, warming to it now:
"I've heard the sound she makes before she laughs twice, once in the cafeteria and once outside the social sciences building, and I don't know why I remember it better than most things—"
They are not looking at Ori. They do not know Ori is within earshot. They are simply doing what people do when they have a piece of shared cultural material that generates laughter: they perform it for each other, repeating it with the particular relish of something that has proven reliably funny and which they have found the rhythm of.
Ori stops walking.
Kael stops beside him.
The woman is still going, her voice doing something with the cadences of Ori's recorded speech that is accurate enough to be recognizable and exaggerated enough to be comedic. She hits the line about trading nothing for something real and puts a specific quality of yearning into it that she has clearly refined over several repetitions, the kind of quality that makes the man next to her cover his face with his hand from the effort of not laughing too loudly.
Ori stands very still on the path three meters away from this.
He stands there for the full duration of the woman's performance, which runs to the end of the nothing-for-something-real line and then breaks on both sides into laughter, genuine and easy, the laughter of two people sharing something they find funny in the clean and uncomplicated way of people for whom the thing has no other dimension.
For them it has no other dimension.
For Ori, standing three meters away in the cold October morning with his coffee going cold in his hand, it is an experience that does not have a clean name. It is not quite humiliation in the acute sense, because that form of it already happened on Friday in Lecture Hall 3. What this is is something longer and lower, a humiliation that has been distributed into the general atmosphere, that has been converted into a resource that other people can pick up and use for their own purposes without any awareness that the original event had an original person in it.
He is the source material.
He is the nothing-for-something-real.
He is the sound before the laugh, twice, once in the cafeteria and once outside the social sciences building.
He turns around.
Kael turns with him without question, without comment, without any adjustment in expression or body language that would indicate that turning around is anything other than the logical next thing to do. He simply pivots and walks beside Ori back the way they came, and neither of them speaks for a moment, and the cold air moves around them, and the campus continues its morning behind them.
They walk to a bench near the library entrance, which is on the opposite side of campus from the social sciences building and which is in a less-trafficked area at this hour. They sit. Ori holds his coffee in both hands. The warmth of it through the cup is the most concrete thing available to him right now and he focuses on it with the deliberate attention of someone anchoring themselves to a physical sensation because the alternative is less stable.
"I don't want to go to the lecture," he says.
"Okay," Kael says.
"I know I should go to the lecture."
"You should go to the lecture," Kael agrees, "but okay covers both things."
Ori looks at the library entrance. A student pushes through the door and disappears inside. Another follows thirty seconds later. The door swings and settles and swings again in the ordinary rhythm of a building being used for its purpose.
"How many people know the words?" he asks.
Kael is quiet for a moment in the way that means he is deciding how much precision the situation calls for. "The clipped version has been shared enough that the main phrases are in general circulation. The cream coat. The nothing for something. The sound before the laugh." He pauses. "People have made graphics of them. Like quote graphics. With the words on a background."
Ori looks at him.
"Some of them are genuinely nice," Kael says, which is the honest version of trying to find something useful in a situation. "Some people think you're a poet. The fan account now has a thousand followers."
"The fan account."
"They're supportive," Kael says. "Genuinely. They're angry at Sela, actually, a lot of them, which is a whole separate thing happening alongside the memes."
Ori thinks about this. The idea of people being angry at Sela on his behalf is complicated in ways he does not have the energy to fully unfold this morning. It requires him to have an opinion about Sela and about what she did, and he has the opinion, he formed the opinion over the course of Saturday sitting at his window, but he has not yet decided what to do with it, what shape it takes when you decide to carry it rather than leave it on the floor.
"I'm going to be late," he says, meaning for the lecture.
"You're going to be a little late," Kael agrees.
"Does it matter?"
Kael looks at him sideways. "Does the lecture matter or does the lateness matter."
"The lecture. Does the lecture matter enough."
It is not really a question about the lecture. They both understand this. It is a question about whether the thing he is being asked to walk back into has enough on offer to justify the cost of walking into it, whether the ordinary continuation of his ordinary academic life is worth the experience of walking through a campus that knows his words and is using them for entertainment on a Monday morning in October.
Kael does not answer immediately. He drinks his coffee. He looks at the library door swinging in its ordinary rhythm.
"I think," Kael says carefully, "that the longer you don't go, the larger the not-going gets. And I think that is true regardless of anything else." He pauses. "But I also think that's a thing you already know, and you're asking me because you want someone to tell you it's okay to not go today, and I'm not going to not tell you that."
Ori looks at him.
"It's okay to not go today," Kael says. "Today specifically. Not as a precedent."
Ori nods.
They sit on the bench in the cold for a while longer without moving toward anything. The campus morning peaks and begins to thin as lectures start and the open spaces empty of the between-classes population. A pigeon investigates the path near their bench with the focused indifference of an animal that has never had a bad Monday and does not anticipate starting now.
Ori watches it.
He thinks about the woman outside the social sciences building doing his voice with the exaggerated yearning she had found in it. He thinks about how precisely she had the cadences, which means she has heard the recording multiple times, which means it has been with her long enough to become familiar, to become something she has internalized well enough to perform. He is in her head. He is in the heads of people who do not know him and who have his words in them alongside song lyrics and catchphrases and all the other things that become part of the texture of a person's inner life when they have been heard enough times.
He thinks about Sela watching the video before she posted it.
He thinks about her sitting in whatever room she went to after Lecture Hall 3, watching one minute and fifty-three seconds of him on her phone screen, making the decision. Thinking about the caption for eight minutes or ten minutes or however long it took. Choosing the third version.
He is not, he realizes, primarily angry at her for the posting.
He is angry at the choosing. At the eight minutes or ten minutes of consideration. At the deliberateness of it. The posting was a thing that happened in a second, a button pressed, a decision in one direction rather than another. The choosing was longer. The choosing had the length of someone sitting with a thing and deciding what to do with it, and the decision that came out of the choosing was: share.
He finishes his coffee.
"I'm going back to the room," he says.
"I'll walk with you."
"You have a lecture."
"I have a lecture in forty minutes," Kael says, which is a different thing.
They walk back across campus. They pass two more instances: a student on his phone playing the original video with the sound on, standing alone outside the communications block, not laughing but listening; and a group of four near the fountain who are not performing the words but are definitely in a conversation about them, their body language and the quality of their attention giving it away in the specific way that conversations about a person give themselves away when you know that you are the person. Ori does not slow at either of these. He keeps his pace steady and his gaze at a middle distance and walks through both of them the way you walk through weather, not looking for shelter, just moving.
Kael walks beside him.
At the dormitory entrance, Kael stops.
"Forty minutes," Ori says.
"Forty minutes," Kael confirms. He looks at Ori with the straight and unperforming look that he keeps for moments that require it. "You are not the meme," he says. "You know that. The meme is a shape made from something that happened. You are not the shape."
Ori looks at him.
He does not say anything in response to this because there is not a response to it that adds to it. He simply nods, once, and Kael nods back, and Ori goes inside.
In his room he puts his bag down and sits on the edge of the bed and does not lie down because lying down would suggest defeat of a kind he is not prepared to accept even from himself, even alone, even in a room where there is no one to perform any particular version of himself for. He sits upright with his feet on the floor and his hands on his knees and looks at the wall.
He does not turn on his phone.
He does not open his laptop.
He sits in the quiet of the room and lets the morning happen around him: the sounds from the corridor, the distant noise of the city, the movement of other people through their ordinary Monday in a building where every floor contains someone who is having a completely different day than Ori is having, most of them easier, some of them harder, all of them indifferent to the specific texture of his.
He sits there.
He sits there for a long time.
After a while he opens his notebook, not to write anything in particular, just to have it open in front of him the way he always has it open in front of him, the presence of the blank page a kind of companionship. He looks at the crossed-out rectangle from last Thursday, the thick block of ink covering the sentence he could not let stand. He looks at the seven words on the page after it, the ones he did not cross out: I think the distance is the problem.
He reads the sentence.
He reads it again.
He picks up his pen and writes beneath it, in the same cramped hand, four more words.
Then he closes the notebook without reading back what he wrote, because he already knows what it says. He wrote it as an act of recording rather than an act of discovery, the way you write down a thing that has already happened.
The four words say: I was right though.
He does not mean about the distance being the problem.
He means about what the problem was.
He sits with this for the rest of the morning, in the quiet room above Vaelmund, while the city goes about its Monday and the memes continue and the view count continues and the woman outside the social sciences building probably performs the words again for someone new with the same practiced yearning in the cadences, and none of it knows that the person at the source of it is sitting upright in a dorm room with a notebook and a pen and the specific and unglamorous work of deciding, slowly, what to do next.
He does not know yet what next is.
He knows what it is not.
It is not this room.
Beyond that, he has no information.
He looks at the ceiling. The water stain holds its shape, the country he has never identified, patient and unchanged, the way some things are patient and unchanged while everything around them becomes unrecognizable.
He closes his eyes.
He does not sleep.
He waits.