Tuesday he goes.
He makes the decision at six forty-eight while still in bed, with the alarm three minutes from going off and the ceiling doing its usual nothing above him. He decides with the flat and pragmatic logic of someone who has run the alternative scenario and found it worse: if he does not go Tuesday, Wednesday becomes harder, and if Wednesday becomes harder then Thursday is a different category of difficulty entirely, and at some point down that road the not-going becomes a thing with its own momentum, a thing that carries him rather than a thing he is choosing, and Ori Ashveil does not want to be carried by his own avoidance. He has enough self-knowledge to understand that particular danger.
So he goes.
He sits through his nine o'clock lecture in the communications block with his notebook open and his pen in his hand and his attention directed at the front of the room with the determined focus of someone performing normality as a discipline rather than experiencing it as a state. The lecturer talks about audience segmentation and Ori writes the words audience segmentation in his notebook and underlines them and adds three bullet points below that are technically accurate representations of what is being said.
He does not look at anyone.
This is a practice in itself, the not-looking, which requires more active management than it sounds like it should. His natural habit is to look at things, to observe, to catalogue. In a room of thirty-two students, the habit wants to scan the faces and read them the way he reads everything, for information, for the small data of expression and posture and attention. He overrides the habit. He keeps his eyes on the front of the room or on his notebook and moves between these two points with the studied regularity of someone following a protocol.
It works for forty minutes.
Then the girl three seats to his left leans toward the boy next to her and says something in a low voice and shows him her phone screen, and the boy glances at it and looks up, and the look goes to Ori, a fast and involuntary glance of the kind people make when the thing on a phone screen and the person in the room are the same thing, and Ori sees the glance in his peripheral vision without turning to meet it and keeps his eyes on the lecturer and writes two more bullet points that he will not be able to read back coherently because his handwriting has gone wrong in the way it goes wrong when his hands are doing one thing and his body is doing another.
The lecture ends.
He leaves before the room fully clears, taking the door to the left while most people move toward the central exit, and he is in the corridor and then outside before the noise of thirty-two people gathering their things has finished happening behind him.
He stands outside in the cold and breathes.
He goes to his next lecture.
This is Tuesday.
Wednesday he goes to one of his three lectures and misses the other two. He tells himself the first miss is logistical, that he left the dormitory slightly late and missing one is not a pattern. He tells himself the second miss is because he was passing through a part of campus and heard a voice doing the cadences, a different voice this time, someone he has never seen before who was performing it for two friends near the east entrance steps, and he turned around and went back to the building he came from and did not come out again for three hours.
He sits in the dormitory common room for the three hours, which is one floor below his room and which is usually unoccupied in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. There is a television in the corner that is never on during the day and two sofas that are slightly too low and a table with a bowl of artificial fruit on it that has been there since before he arrived and which he suspects will be there after he leaves. He sits on the less uncomfortable sofa and does not turn on the television and does not open his phone and does not do anything in particular except exist in the room at a level of visibility slightly below being in his own room, because his own room has started to feel like a container that is slightly too small for the thing currently living in it.
Thursday he does not go at all.
He wakes up at seven thirteen and lies on his back and looks at the ceiling and the alarm goes off and he turns it off and lies there for a while longer. He constructs, with some care, a version of the morning in which he gets up and showers and makes his coffee and puts on his jacket and goes to campus, and the version is detailed and plausible, and he stays in the bed.
He gets up at eleven. He makes coffee. He stands at the window and watches the street below for a while with the unfocused attention of someone whose available processing is elsewhere. He eats something that he does not remember choosing from the small supply of food on the shelf beside the wardrobe. He sits at his desk.
He opens his phone.
He has told himself, each day since Saturday, that he is not going to check the numbers, and each day he checks the numbers with the helpless regularity of someone pressing a bruise to confirm it still hurts. The video is at five hundred and thirty thousand. His follower count is at nine thousand four hundred and twelve, which is a number he cannot make sense of, that almost ten thousand people have chosen to follow an account that has seven months of silence and a profile photo in which he is looking at something outside the frame.
He scrolls into the comment sections.
He does this the way he does it every day: with the intention of looking briefly and the result of looking for longer than he intended, drawn deeper by the specific gravity of a comment section that contains his name. The topmost comments have been there long enough to accumulate their own sub-threads, small arguments between strangers about what kind of person Ori Ashveil is based on one minute and fifty-three seconds of footage that none of them witnessed in real time. He is: romantic or unsettling, depending on who you ask. He is: poetic or obsessive. He is: brave or pitiable. He is: the confession boy, which is the name that has stuck with the reliability of things that fit a shape and will not be dislodged.
He reads comments that are kind about him and comments that are not kind about him and comments that are kind about Sela and comments that are not kind about Sela and comments about the comments and meta-discussions about the ethics of filming someone without their knowledge that are being conducted by people who are simultaneously watching the footage filmed without his knowledge, which is an irony that several of the commenters are aware of and address with varying degrees of self-awareness.
He closes the app.
He opens it again fourteen minutes later.
He puts the phone in his desk drawer and closes the drawer and does not open it for two hours.
Kael texts throughout the day. Not urgently, not in the way that urgent texts arrive, pressured and requiring, but in the low and steady rhythm of someone who has decided that presence is the most useful thing they can offer and who is offering it from a distance because the closer offering has not been invited. The texts are small things: a observation about a lecturer, a question about whether Ori has a specific textbook, a message about a film that started streaming, a follow-up about the film that has nothing to do with the film. Ori reads them all. He responds to two with single words and to a third with a sentence, and Kael responds to each response within thirty seconds with the promptness of someone who has his phone in his hand because he is waiting for it.
Ori does not respond to the rest.
Not because he does not want to. Not because the texts are unwelcome. They are the most welcome thing happening to him on a Thursday when he has not left his room, the small reliable evidence of a person thinking about him in a way that requires nothing from him in return. He does not respond to the rest because the part of him that manages outward communication is running below its usual capacity, doing its maintenance work rather than its full function, keeping the most essential things operational while other things are temporarily offline.
Friday he makes it to one lecture. His attendance record, which was middling before and is now, by the end of the week, something that could begin attracting the attention of the department's welfare monitoring system if the pattern continues.
He sits in the lecture and takes notes in the cramped handwriting and does not look at anyone and leaves by the left door and goes to the cafeteria because he is hungry in the concrete and pressing way that the body becomes hungry when it has been eating irregularly for several days and has decided to make the irregularity inconvenient.
He buys food. He takes it to the window table.
He sits alone.
This is the same table he has always sat at, the one technically meant for four that other students have stopped trying to join. He has been sitting at this table for two years. He sits at it now with his food and his notebook and his pen and the practiced signals of someone who prefers to be left to it, and for a while it works, the table does what it has always done.
Then a pair of students he does not know take the table directly adjacent to his, which they have every right to do, and one of them has her phone on the table with the screen facing up, and the screen has the video on it, paused at the frame that has become the most shared still image from the footage, the profile of Ori's face in the flat institutional light, his eyes on the whiteboard, his expression the open and unguarded expression of someone who does not know what is happening to them.
She does not play the video.
She is just eating her lunch with her phone on the table the way people have their phones on tables, as background, as context, as the ambient presence of the digital alongside the physical. The video is simply there on the screen because she was watching it recently and it is still open. She is not thinking about it. She is talking to her companion about something that has nothing to do with the video.
Ori eats his lunch.
He eats it looking at his food, and then at his notebook, and then out the window, and the screen with the paused video sits in his peripheral vision with the quiet persistence of a thing that has been attached to his daily experience in a way he did not ask for and cannot remove.
He finishes eating.
He closes his notebook.
He stands and takes his tray to the return and walks out of the cafeteria into the cold Friday afternoon and back to the dormitory and up to his floor and into his room and closes the door.
He sits on the bed.
He sits there for a long time.
The water stain on the ceiling holds its shape. The wardrobe door that does not close all the way stands open by its usual few centimeters. The notebook is in his bag. The phone is in his desk drawer. The city is outside the window, doing what it does, indifferent and ongoing and full of people having completely different Fridays.
Something is wrong with the room.
He has lived in this room for two years and knows every surface of it and every smell of it and the exact quality of the light at every hour, and something about it has changed since last week in a way that is not about the room itself but about the relationship between him and the room, the way a room can become the wrong size without changing its dimensions, the size of the person in it shifting until the room either feels too large or too small and this one feels both, simultaneously, in the specific way of spaces that a person has been alone in for too long without choosing to be alone.
He lies back on the bed.
He looks at the ceiling.
He does not open his phone.
He does not open the notebook.
He does not call Kael, though he thinks about it, holds the thought of it in his hand like a stone he could throw or set down.
He sets it down.
He is so tired.
Not the tired of not sleeping, though he is that too. The tired underneath that, the longer and less specific tired of someone who has been managing something carefully for several days and whose management reserves are approaching a level that requires restocking, some essential internal supply that careful management burns through and which requires something he cannot currently identify to replenish.
He does not know what the something is.
He does not know that he is about to find out.
He does not know that the something will announce itself not gently but suddenly, not as a door opening but as a sound, the kind of sound that does not belong to rooms or to cities or to any category of noise that a person who has been lying quietly in a dorm room on a Friday afternoon has any reason to be prepared for.
He does not know any of this yet.
He knows only the ceiling, and the tired, and the shape of the country he has never identified, and the city below the window that is still happening without him.
He closes his eyes.
He waits.