An MRI machine. A urine sample. Someone asked me about my background of substance use—why, what’re you offering?— and my family medical history and mental health. Standard-issue depression and anxiety enjoyed by all humans with a pulse, just a dash of all-purpose gay body dysmorphia. I waited for the finger puppets of Jungian archetypes and the please tell us about your relationship with your father. Were you loved? Thankfully, the head-shrinking didn’t last long.

I pressed my fingertips to my temples in a useless attempt to massage away my headache. The only thing I’d eaten that day was a bag of chips on the plane. I was crabby enough to threaten the next person who walked in with how I was going to rip off the hospital gown and run naked through these goddamned hallways if someone didn’t get me some food. Turns out that was Yusuf.

“Did I pass the tests?” I asked in the hallway after I’d shrugged into my clothes.

“You’re human,” Yusuf said, not meeting my eyes. “So, who knows.”

He buzzed us through locked glass double-doors into another maze, trailing a vein of deep green painted onto the floor while I bobbed along, balloon-brained from the blood draws. A cold sandwich in the cafeteria with its sterile yellow walls didn’t bring me back to life. Kaori’s words about “some version of you” still bounced around the echo chamber of my head.

Two huge glass doors at the end of another hallway were buck teeth in a giant mouth, with the words “Theater One” stenciled across in white block letters. Beyond, I could see walls of screens and panels, with a giant gray machine an island in the white floor.

“You ready?” Yusuf asked.

His eyes finally hit mine. My throat was suddenly clogged with sand. I don’t get speechless. I word-bomb. Even when I’d argued with Narek and realized, two minutes in, that I was the one who was wrong, I dug my heels in and rambled. Pestered with brute force until he’d fling his hands in surrender and hightail it, grumbling.

“Any advice?”

Yusuf’s eyebrows crowded together in a small V. “She needs you. Don’t let her convince you otherwise.”

I stepped closer and the double doors whooshed open on their own.

4

VOICEOVER

Forget about film studies snobs bellyaching. Sometimes you need a voiceover.