Jeff awoke to the customary sights and sounds of morning as framed by the nearest window within his cluttered apartment in Seoul. A solemn, single-size bed enveloped him in its filthy sheets, unwashed since he’d first moved in, the circumambient stench having long ago succumbed to its source’s near-total indifference.
Otherwise bare of fixtures, his apartment featured as its obvious centerpiece a sturdy wooden desk which the previous renters were thoughtful enough to have left behind. Coincidentally, its dimensions were precisely attuned to the high-performance gaming PC Jeff had installed upon it within a week of moving in—the first and last project
he’d undertaken to embellish his quarters with something other than empty instant noodle cups and cheap toiletry. It even lit up, once activated, with flashy RGB lights like the nightclubs he never visited, the Christmas tree his parents still put up each year. He’d spent every penny of his life’s savings to buy it, a choice he’d tried justifying with the flimsy excuse that its maxed-out stats would empower him to apply for jobs “like no one else ever before.” Only now, the idea of applying himself to anything was a long-lost cause.
Despite having no means whatsoever to live in the center of Seoul during an abiding housing crisis, Jeff had managed to convince his parents to permit him an allowance, to be paid off in time, because it was the cheapest apartment he could find in “the best city for getting employed.” The transfers to his account, deposited monthly like clockwork, remained the sole mode of communication between them. He did not wonder whether they persisted in maintaining this existence out of deluded hope, sheer habit, or the more probable fear, perhaps, that taking away this corner he’d planted himself in would lead him to embrace rootlessness like a lover for good.
Privately, Jeff told himself he’d wanted to live in Seoul because he’d grown up in the city and loved it like anyone else would a place they, having been nowhere else, thought of as the world. Yet, some renegade part of Jeff’s mind loved Seoul for being precisely all that he wasn’t: its streets jam-packed with tirelessly active people, rushing in and out of their
homes and workplaces like relentless cogs in a great machine, the skylines overwhelmed by sleek, razored skyscrapers, each a testament to the sheer labor responsible for their enduring construction.
Though he hardly ever traced these feelings back to their source, he was conscious, at least, that he felt respect for all that urban sprawl beyond his small window; but that other feeling, the muted cringe which buried the undeniable mere moments after appearing, was a persistent and defining humiliation which Jeff lacked the inner strength and vision to name.
Ultimately, however wretched his bed or mildewy his bathroom became, Jeff’s daily life would remain unaffected pending some life-altering catastrophe. And because this never came, because he had been stuck in his ways for well over two years now, Jeff endured the same dead-end routine with an automaticity like breathing.
As soon as his alarm clock struck the tenth-to-twelfth hour following the preceding night’s slumber, he’d proceed unthinking to his folding chair, reboot the PC, and then bathe a bit in its dancing lights before gaming non-stop alongside Keyboard Warrior, his constant online companion, until sleep claimed him once again.
It didn’t matter to Jeff that Keyboard Warrior’s birthname remained a mystery; even his was sometimes synonymous in his mind with his own long-held username. What was the use, after all, of his, or anyone’s, actual identity, when there was nobody left in his life to remind him who he used to be? All his old school pals had moved on to full-time careers, even children, and could not keep in touch with him even if they tried.
That’s at least what Jeff told himself whenever stray thoughts or fast-fading memories of those people came upon him during loading screens or while the microwave held his attention. But it was Jeff, in fact, who told them he was too busy for even informal get-togethers. Not that it was his fault, of course; how could it be, when all his money had gone to his computer for the express purpose of applying for jobs.
In any case, Keyboard Warrior did not judge Jeff for what he was, for what he could yet be or have been; they were, for each other, stable sources of less lonesome entertainment, so totally enmeshed in the repetition of the present as to have lost all sight of the future, the past, the possible.
It was therefore strange enough to warrant Jeff’s suspicions, that morning like any other, when, as he played his usual matches with Keyboard Warrior, he felt a sudden pang of curiosity regarding his friend’s life beyond the screen. Perhaps a subconscious longing for a different kind of understanding had finally crested through the swampy indifference of Jeff’s apathy to formulate itself as an explicit intention. But even though literal years had by now passed synced to each other’s headsets, they’d spoken so little about their actual selves that Jeff felt more anxious than ever mustering the courage to say something new.
“Yo.”
“Sup.”
“If you, um, don’t mind—”
“Yeah?”
“What’s your name?”
“Sorry?”
“You know, your birthname.”
“Tim. Why?”
“Oh.... Like, I’m Jeff, dude.”
“Damn, I never realized that. Jeff! All this time....”
“Where do you live?”
“Seoul.”
“Seoul where?”
“Jongno-gu”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Me too.”
“No shit?”
None, indeed. They even laughed heartily at the irony, the world being so small after all. In a friendship until then predicated by inarticulate rage and tacit tolerance, it was a rare display of authentically shared joy.
After a few more minutes of talking, they decided to plan what only seemed natural: to meet up and play games together, in the flesh, at a local PC cafe in about a week’s time.
“But how will we find each other if we don’t know what we look like?” Tim raised a good point; they had never bothered to engage in a video call.
Before Jeff could reply, Tim had his webcam turned on and a request already sent. Hesitant, yet without feeling especially anxious, Jeff proceeded to turn on his own, smiling with rare, because earnest, anticipation. But instead of seeing the face of his friend, Jeff was momentarily blinded by the rapid, stroboscopic play of nightclub colors, the lights on his computer flashing more brightly than ever before.
As his vision adjusted and then finally returned, a moment of stupefied confusion overtook him. What exactly was he looking at? Not the game they’d just left off on; not the pop-up for the video call which emerged in its midst. And surely not Tim himself, no, absolutely not.
Jeff then realized that his vision was rather obviously directed at his own face as it looked back into the monitor.
“Why do I see just myself? Is there poor connection?”
No reply. Yet it was immediately clear that he was not actually speaking through his headset any longer. The tinny, static-laden sound of his voice resounded through a compressed medium, as though he were trapped inside some narrow cranny of his own computer. And that’s all it took—that simple, unlikely thought—to realize what had actually happened.
Jeff was stuck inside his webcam.
Like waking up buried alive, Jeff panicked as he strained to force himself out, first squiggling, then shaking what he perceived as the pressurized outlines of his body. But the more violently he tried to move, the clearer it became that his physical form was no longer in his control and no longer truly his; that whatever vessel he occupied was as immaterial as the beings that populated the video games he played so religiously. All the while, Jeff’s physical body, still seated in the folding chair, somehow moved and spoke to Tim, unseen, as the video call carried on.
Jeff’s panic passed swiftly, well before he’d noticed the eclipsing onset of numbness; perhaps because his experience of life as an intangible digitalized entity was not substantially different from the one he was still living in that moldering chair. Having
already resigned himself to self-hypnosis for so long, he hardly struggled to escape his situation once it became clear that he lacked a body with which to do so. Instead, he decided to merely watch himself, like another tedious game, until a new “level” appeared.
Hours and hours passed, and, same as any other day, whenever his fleshly self looked upon the screen, Jeff saw, in turn, the same tawdry games and brain-rotting videos reflected off the black pits of his double’s externalized eyes. Even when he paused to have a meal, Jeff-in-the-flesh would invariably return to his desk, microwave noodles in tow, to watch YouTube videos of gaming playthroughs until he finished his food and acquired the hands necessary to resume his own.
At first, Jeff envied himself. Seeing him playing and laughing with Tim filled him with as much anxious longing for the lifestyle he used to enjoy as it did frustration over the apparent impossibility of ever escaping his unaccountable prison. But then the day gave way to more days. And those days became like weeks giving way to more weeks. And though his vision, his very consciousness, toggled off and on to the activation and deactivation of his computer, the former corresponding quite neatly to each new day, the latter to each end, he soon lost track of all time, having lost so much of the human qualities that remind us of the rhythms according to which life flows—hunger, weariness, the capacity to dream.
At last, the catastrophe Jeff required to change his life had finally befallen him. Yet he no longer had the capacity to change it. Bound in the machine that had captured his attention for years already, Jeff was consumed not just with paralysis but the bitterest of ironies in realizing this simple fact, as obvious as it would have been had he looked a little longer in the mirror: that his life as he lived it was worse than boring, worse than failure.
It was utterly meaningless.
If he had eyes through which to cry, he would have wept entire days, like on the day he witnessed himself do nothing but lay in bed; never leaving to go outside, not even to the bathroom, doing his business in empty bottles and cups strewn across the ground beside him, doubled over in the fetal position as he stared blankly into the darkness, into the distance, face pitiless and unmoving like something awaiting its long-delayed birth to the looping tune of rain he’d left playing overnight, the computer whirring on in the purblind darkness.
And how he fantasized of all the things he’d say if only he’d had a mouth through which to bark rebukes against himself, even when he did go out to buy food or toilet-paper, knowing he’d return with the utter trash he was used to consuming, though never before had he seen with such clarity the ruins of his flesh which this diet had resulted in, nor the mounds of instant noodles, the hoarded, empty bags of fast-food pooling grease on the dust-laden floor.
When his physical self sometimes looked out the window—implying a mind, somehow, still worked inside him, even out there, drawing him incomprehensibly beyond to the city, the greater world—he would look there, too, miming himself, only, from within the machine, he knew he wished with far greater clarity of mind that it was he who was out there, talking to people, being among them, learning and failing and growing. Even if only to be around Tim, feeling the air and the sun, and not wasting away in this air-conditioned nightmare until death claimed him like the flies that dirtied the windowsills.
At some point he realized, before being deactivated, that this life he had lived was itself deactivation, a slow-motion pantomime of death.
All this inarticulate pain made Jeff grieve for his parents, for what he finally came to believe was, in fact, their abiding love and hope for him, who never stopped believing that he was doing his best to get employed, to get a life, because they believed that their belief might move even a mountain.
Jeff realized, without being able to change anything about it, that he had wasted his parents’ support on bleak toys that distracted him not only from the world but from them: from whatever they saw in him and that he, whether in or out of the computer, could not even contemplate without wanting to die from shame.
At last, Jeff concluded that the world would be a better place without that guy outside the camera, wasting space for nothing and no one. It was the darkest thought to ever cross his mind, yet in the moment of its articulation, he realized that, if fate ever blessed him with release, he would not permit himself to perpetuate this vain fixation on empty, flashing lights.
But ages seemed to have passed since he’d first entered the machine, and Jeff still could not find a single solution to his predicament. All he could do was continue watching himself act against his own will in the closed world of his increasingly terrifying apartment. From what felt like millennia of careful scrutiny, he was now able to predict every minute movement of his physical body, down even to the superficially random variations of his routine, those rare days when he would not rise from bed at all; like a robot whose fate, down to each fluke, had been programmed far in advance.
Yet Jeff had forgotten that even the wretch beyond the screen had made plans for something new. And so, the day finally came when Jeff left to meet Tim at the PC cafe, just as planned a week prior. It was the first time in ages that he had gone outside for something he didn’t require for his own survival. And it was the first time in a long time, for Jeff inside the screen, that time itself could be accounted for.
Before leaving, the Jeff outside the camera, so thoroughly anxious he’d even spent some hours cleaning up the place for once, decided to join one last video call with Tim, just to ensure they didn’t make the mistake of confusing someone else for each other.
And Jeff surely felt like an idiot in that moment, because he knew, as you do, dear reader, that this was all he’d ever needed: the moment Jeff-in-the-flesh turned on his webcam, the first time he’d done so in a week, a stroboscopic play of shiny Christmas lights bounced and swarmed across the non-existent face of his double, only to disappear as quickly as it had emerged, and with it the difference between them.
“I’m back!”
“Huh?”
“ALIVE! I was trapped in these wires a whole week! But it felt like eons, Tim, a goddamn Earth-age!”
“What the fu—”
“Look, I need to tell you something that I’ve been thinking over for quite some time. Longer than we’ve ever lived, perhaps!”
“Are you on something?”
“I want to change. For good! I want to get a job, you know, and become a better man—”
“Dude, are you crying??”
“—But I don’t think I want to play video games anymore. Not for a while, at least, I’d get sick! I think we should go somewhere else, Tim. For God’s sake, a park!”
•
A month passed. Jeff had spent it taking daily strolls with Tim, who quickly came to accept and admire his suddenly transformed friend, divesting his room, and Tim’s too, of all its junk, and visiting his parents, who were happy enough just to see him.
He hadn’t activated his computer at all ever since that fateful morning. Yet there he was again, seated in front of that same old desk. Only, this time, the chair was a swivel, ergonomic, and his whole apartment had been freshly repainted, with bright coats of white and light blue. His bathroom was purged of its mildewy filth like the rest of his apartment, and there were no more smelly sheets, no leftover food or trash on his neatly dusted desk. Most importantly, Jeff himself had undergone quite a makeover, with his brand-new suit nice and neat for the virtual job interview.
There was a lingering doubt, a suspicion of evil: what if all of this were some perverse dream, and he was still stuck inside, or being duped into getting stuck once again, right at the moment when he was so determined to represent himself as a changed man.
But nothing happened when, shivering, he turned the webcam back on, and it was as though fate itself, before the interviewer appeared, was letting Jeff know he was on the right track.
