EmoSpecs Participant No. 3

This story contains instances of physical violence and a fictional treatment of mental health issues.

“Congratulations! You’ve been chosen to participate in a revolutionary new approach to security. Are you still unemployed?”

“Yes,” I responded to the caller.

“Great. We would need you four nights a week, six hours a night, guarding our lab. Salary is ten thousand a month. You’d be standing in the street so you would have to dress warmly.”

I accepted. Life had been dull and I needed stimulation.

Actually, that was an understatement. I had been diagnosed with “emotional numbness,” the inability to experience emotions. I’d been living in a world of indifference for over a year, and couldn’t remember what it felt like to experience any emotion.

It could be brought on by a childhood trauma, or something more recent, I was told. Therapy had been ineffective so far.

Sessions were repetitive, and would go something like this: “Let’s get back to your childhood. Tell me about your eleventh birthday again.”

Most of my memories don’t have color, but my eleventh birthday was the last birthday that I could actually call to mind a color. For some reason the therapist latched onto this. Every session I would remind her about my ice cream cake with Spider-Man’s face drawn on in red gel icing.

“And how did that make you feel?”

I had anticipated that cake for weeks. I had been excited.

“Can you feel those feelings of anticipation and excitement now? Try to re-experience them.”

At first I would say no, a Spider-Man ice cream cake would not give me the same feelings it did twenty years ago today. She was trying to get me to remember the emotion, to put me in the shoes of my eleven-year-old self. It didn’t work though. If I couldn’t feel emotion now, how could I remember an old one?

She would jump to my twelfth birthday. All I could remember is that was around the time my Dad and Mom split up. I think we went bowling, but I couldn’t remember any colors, except for the white pins. Apparently that didn’t count.

“Did you have a cake on your twelfth birthday?”

I couldn’t remember.

The new job came with a special “revolutionary” pair of sunglasses. They looked like normal aviator frames with tinted lenses. But they had cameras and microphones built in to record everything I experienced. When I turned them on by pressing a button over the right eye, a stream of text would float in the air about two feet in front of my face, as if there was a computer screen there. The text contained disclaimers and “Terms and Conditions,” all of which I had to accept by thinking the word, “accept.” There were also two tiny metal disks on each of the arms, back where they hook over the ears. When I first put them on, the metal was cold against my temple.

The night I started the job, it rained continuously, and I got soaked. Boots, pants, jacket, head. All wet.

It had been the same for the first three evenings. I was told to stand out there under the streetlight from 7 pm to 1 am. Across from a three-story industrial looking warehouse building that covered a full city block in the Arts district, a now-trendy part of Los Angeles. Away from the center of the district, this street was not heavily traveled. I saw an Uber one night, a semi truck the next.

They said I had to wear the glasses, rain or shine. And no umbrella, that was explicit.

“They should see that you are there. They need to see your face, so they feel safe.”

It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The rainy season in LA. In other parts of the country, this weather would be considered balmy, but with rain soaking through my clothes, 52 Fahrenheit was chilly.

Despite the discomfort, I was still emotionally numb. I wasn’t judging my employers or cursing the fates that made me need a job. I accepted my situation as a means to an end. I had agreed to the terms of employment. I was getting paid. And I didn’t believe in fate.

The instructions that came with the glasses told me never to remove them while on duty, “or else your salary will be penalized.” What about going to the bathroom? I thought. I guess it didn’t matter. There was no bathroom where I was stationed, and I was told not to leave my post for the full six hours. I decided to drink a lot of water during the day and have a big pee just before starting work in the evening.

On the third day, I miscalculated and drank more water than I could pee out. As usual, I got soaked and that stimulated the urge to empty my bladder.

A lot of people don’t realize it but there’s a natural river right through the center of Los Angeles, which has been paved over with concrete. It was dry most of the year, except when it rained. My post happened to be a block away from the river, so I made a plan for the end of my shift. By 1 am, my bladder was about to burst and I yanked the glasses off before running down there and pissing in the relatively full current.

There were lights on the street that ran alongside the top of the concrete gully. After I recovered from running to the river, I saw that I was not alone. On the other side of a bridge that crossed the river to my left, a woman stood looking at the water rushing between tufts of grass growing through the concrete.

How long had she been there? I wondered. Why had she come to the edge of the river? She just stood there looking at the water. Unmoving. Although freshly fed by rain, the river was not fast or deep enough to drown a body, so I guessed she was not there to commit suicide. She was backlit by a streetlight, so her profile looked like a half moon. The lit part didn’t include her face, but I could see her head was hunched forward, and her hands were fisted. She wore a long red coat. Like me, she didn’t have an umbrella.

It’s funny, but I’m only realizing this now. That was the beginning of when I started to feel emotions again. Curiosity. Empathy. Sadness. I wanted to walk over and offer help. She seemed to be going through a difficult time.

She hadn’t noticed me. She also hadn’t noticed that, further along the same river bank, on the other side of her from me, was a third person walking towards her. A sort of shamble, attempting to sneak up on her. As he got closer, he veered up the slope, away from the river, to come in behind her. He slowed down, hesitated.

The man was now between the streetlight and the woman. He had long stringy hair and a long stringy beard. His clothes consisted only of a thin cotton gown, as if he had escaped from a hospital ward. Or an insane asylum. Sticking to his skin from the rain. He held something long and pointy, like an ice pick.

I struggled between revulsion and fear, but didn’t move.

The man paused and hovered in place, torso bobbing up and down like an ape sizing up its prey.

I should have called out. I should have run to help her. But my mind was caught in its own current. Unlike the LA River though, this was no concrete-bounded flow. Wild, un-channeled emotions sent my mind exploding in many directions at once.

I could only watch as the man moved slowly closer to her. She saw his shadow and turned around. Did she know him? She waved him off but he continued moving closer. She crouched. Cowered. Flung up her arms.

Get up! I wanted to shout. Run! But I couldn’t push out more than a hoarse whisper that was eaten by the sound of water on hard concrete.

He was on her. They struggled. He wrestled her to the ground. Pinned her arms. He jabbed the object he was carrying into her eye. She screamed and it echoed along the ravine. Surely someone would notice? Rescue her? Nobody came.

It felt like an hour that I was stuck in place, but I think it must have been only half a minute. Finally, I moved. I scrambled up the bank of the ravine and ran home. My fingertips bled from the wet hard scrabbling and I rinsed them for five minutes in the sink until the water ran clear.

I slept most of the next day and woke from dreams of swirling colors. My sheets were soaked with sweat and crumpled, as if from a struggle. I coughed and choked for a few minutes, unable to shake off the tears in my eyes, the need to scream, the sputtering urge to rebreathe the same air.

Among the wash of images and sensations that had shaken loose while I dreamt were memories from my twelfth birthday. The bowling alley. Mostly dark, but with flashing lights. My father and mother fighting. He had been drinking.

You’re holding me back, he said. I can’t reach my full potential. I’m holding you back? she said. I put my life on hold and worked so you could go to school and fulfill your goddamn potential. You wouldn’t know what to do with potential if you actually had any.

Him gone. Her crying, looking at me with shame. I now remembered a color from that birthday. My mother’s eye was a rich indigo violet.

I went back to work that evening, afraid to be so close to the place where the assault had happened. Afraid to be alone with my thoughts. The boredom and monotony of the job would leave me vulnerable to the torment of memories from childhood and those of the previous night. But I went anyway. I think part of me was planning to visit the river again, hoping to see the woman. Despite the strong likelihood that she had been killed by the hairy attacker.

As luck would have it, the night was dry, but with that biting cold that follows rain.

When I arrived at my post, I put the glasses on. The two metal disks embedded in the ear rests contacted my temples and I pressed the tiny button over the right eye. The startup text printed itself across my vision. That was normal. But as soon as I accepted the Terms and Conditions, the overwhelming emotions I had been feeling — guilt, shame, sorrow — were soothed. It was as if the cool and precisely machined surfaces absorbed strong feelings and replaced them with calm.

I reveled in the relief. I think I may have smiled, but soon even that was erased.

I was left feeling the way I had become accustomed to. Empty. Indifferent. However, this abrupt emotional numbness was different from my mental state that had evolved over months, if not years.

Loss of emotion not only tames and simplifies the inner world of the present, but also dulls any anticipation of the future and grays out any judgement of the past. Having all of these go away at once was particularly poignant, and left me in a sort of sad grief. This was of course short-lived, because it also decayed like dust into a vacuum.

I went on like this, oscillating between relief and grief, for I don’t know how long. I began to wonder, was it the glasses that were taking away my ability to feel emotions?

I almost didn’t notice when the door of the building opened. It was the first time this had happened since I had started the job.

A woman peered out. It was her. Still alive. Wearing last night’s long red coat. She pushed the heavy metal on its hinges and looked around warily. She saw me across the street and walked out erratically, heading my way. Her left eye was covered by a black eyepatch.

Any feelings I had in response were sucked away before they had a chance to register.

I watched her coming toward me. The street was empty as always. She was weak, in distress. Afraid. She was escaping. From what, I didn’t know.

She fell into my arms. I am not a particularly strong man. I tried to support her weight, but as I felt the press of her body and smelled the floral spice in her hair I staggered back. After some moments, though, the equalizing effect of the glasses (I assumed) somehow gave me strength to support her. She regained her footing.

“Protect me,” she said.

“You’re not dead,” I said, feeling relief, which evaporated into blankness.

The door opened again and two men wearing hospital scrubs came out and headed towards us. They were wearing glasses like mine.

“There you are,” one of them said to the woman. He had straight oily hair with a bowl undercut that fell across his glasses in front.

The other one, who I quickly realized was the stringy haired and bearded attacker from the previous evening, roughly grabbed the woman and pulled her out of my arms. He carried himself like a prowling gorilla. Unlike before, when I had imagined he was half man, half beast, I now sensed a malign intelligence in his deep set eyes and twisted sneer.

“You can’t do this,” I said, with a conviction that only remained as long as it took to say the words.

“Don’t interfere,” last night’s attacker said, pulling the woman away from me.

“Do your job,” straight hair said.

Were they working for the same company as I?

I was unable to decide whether to try to stop them or accept their legitimacy. The glasses were deadening any strong response I might have had. The woman had asked for my protection. With a fleeting sense of duty, I reached out to her.

The best I could do was pull at the eyepatch, which snapped out of my fingers as the men yanked her away, but flipped up to expose her eye. I was surprised to find that her left eye was bruised, but still whole. She briefly looked at me, sad and ashamed, her eye ringed a rich indigo violet color.

I passed the next minutes or hours staring at the now closed door, oscillating between emotion and indifference. The image of the woman’s bruised eye repeatedly returning to my thoughts.

I wanted her to come out again. I wanted to follow her inside and rescue her from the two abductors. I wanted nothing.

I was a failure. I was doing my job.

The metal disks on the glasses were heating up. Maybe they were overwhelmed by my now over productive emotional system. Eventually the urge to follow her won out.

The door wasn’t locked. Behind it lay a long hallway, closed doors on either side. At the end of the hall, an open door. I made for the open door.

It was an auditorium. A man in a lab coat was at a podium addressing a crowd of men and women in suits. Talking about a product called “EmoSpecs.” Saying something about how traditional marketing fails to fully stimulate a consumer’s emotions. The new product would provide an “integrated, emotional, shopping experience,” in the form of enhanced smart eyewear.

The woman was there, operating a keyboard and showing images on a huge screen behind the podium. Her eyepatch was gone. The two men in scrubs were sitting on chairs to the side.

They were showing a video of the building I’d been guarding. Short green vertical lines along the bottom of the video measured something. The door of the building opened and the woman emerged, walking toward the camera, wearing her eyepatch. Some of the lines grew longer.

The woman crashed into the camera, saying, “Protect me.” The lines stretched further, changing color from green to red.

Other lines shot up to red when long stringy hair and straight oily hair came out and dragged her away.

The man at the podium narrated how the experimental subject could be manipulated to remain at his post, despite his powerful emotional response. The camera, which had been shaking, stabilized and the lines became short and green again.

“EmoSpecs connect directly to a wearer’s limbic system, the brain’s emotion center. With the proper calibration we can enhance a user’s response to your product, filtering out unhelpful emotions faster than you can say ‘buyer’s remorse.’”

Nervous laughter.

I wanted to shout, Don’t listen to him! They are manipulating people without their knowledge! But then I realized, that is precisely what this audience wants. And then it didn’t matter. Betrayal and indignation relaxed, and I forgot why I was standing there.

The man described how the glasses could be recalibrated to focus on different products using periodic software updates.

I turned away as he was saying, “How many software updates and how often, is up to you.” More nervous laughter.

I walked back out into the street and took my post. It began to rain, but I didn’t mind.