For Now I See

Written by Anakin McFly

I. through a glass

It hurt him to watch even from shadows a distance away, torn between respecting his private pain and wanting to be there for him at least in spirit if not in sight. Dawn had just broken outside and the tourists had yet to arrive. In the silence and still, the set might have really been a part of another world, and for the moment there was no one but them to claim otherwise.

Neo's reaction when they'd first arrived: that look of desperate homesick yearning would haunt him for days to come. The way his breath caught in his throat, the way his tense frame struggled to make it over the barrier into the cabin that had, in another place, been his.

He'd dared not follow after. He knew it would break the spell.

Neo facing the cabin, his back to the fourth wall, reaching out tentative fingers to touch the metal walls in strokes of light caress. He saw him trembling as he fingered the metal frame above his bed, let it go, and sank down onto the mattress, legs curled up towards him, face buried in the pillow with eyes forcefully shut in desperate imagination. Imagine a door, closed. The slow thrum of the Nebuchadnezzar. A metal corridor outside, leading out into the rest of the ship. People passing by, footsteps clanking. Fluorescent lights flickering on to mark the time. Waking up to breakfast, brought in by someone who loved him.

Keanu left at the first sob.

II. darkly, but then face to face

He found him once before the television set, remote control in his hand and the screen freeze-framed on a shot of Trinity's face. Neo had not noticed his presence in the room; if he had, he made no indication to show it, his mind caught up elsewhere in that other world to which he could no longer return, his eyes fixed on the screen and the movie it played – his last connection to his home – with a look of such painful, longing desperation that the actor was forced to look away and leave the room to let him be, wishing there were something he could do.

Everything gone, just like that, reduced to nothing more than fiction; happened sometimes, they said, we're sorry, they said, nothing we can do about it but we hope you feel better soon, they said, and then they got on with their work and left Neo alone with a creeping, gigantic void where his whole life used to be, the memories of times and places and people still so real in his mind and his memories and dreams that he could never quite divest himself of the conviction that he was still going home some day. Some day.

He heard Neo cry out one night when the gnawing loneliness grew too much too bear. The yell was angry, primal almost, accompanied by a violent yet futile punch at the wall, then another punch, with less energy this time, and a weakest third, then it all subsided into quiet, angry sobs as he lay in bed facing the wall, which was how the actor found him when he went to his room and opened the door a crack.

For a while he just stood there, not knowing what to say. Words would interrupt the grief and cheapen the moment; and so he said nothing, doing nothing more than being there in some feeble show of solidarity until Neo seemed to calm down somewhat, and then he went away.

From then on Neo always locked his door.

#

The film ended. Neo cut it off before the credits, as he always did. Turned off the television set, kept the DVD, then passed him in silence, going straight on to his room without so much as a glance to acknowledge his existence.

The lock clicked shut in the door.

He never really knew what Neo got up to in there – computer stuff, he figured, for that had been his lodger's sole request, and he had seen no good reason to deny it: a computer with an Internet connection. His own lack of familiarity with the technological realm meant that Neo's easy genius with all things digital continued to impress him; the knowledge of what Neo could do and had done left him always with a faint glow of pride. He hoped that he wasn't coming up with some cyber-armageddon in there – he didn't want to be held responsible, and he had the feeling that he might if it happened. But he decided that Neo would know better and was doing nothing more than finding solace in the digital world he knew so well. The intricacies and complexities of 21st century cyberspace doubtless held its own strangeness that would have taken time to get used to, but Neo was good at this stuff. He would have worked that out in no time.

Getting used to real life was another question. Neo had tried and failed to get a job so as to carve some kind of independent existence out in this foreign world, but no one would take him. His skill and experience lay in computers – software engineering, to be precise, which would have placed him – if hired – in the kind of workplace filled with Matrix geeks who would have spent all day staring and not getting anything useful done. Potential employees knew this, the thought always at the back of their mind during job interviews as they squirmed a little and never quite looked him in the eye, knowing that Mr. Thomas Anderson was different and not knowing quite how to relate to him and talk to him, because it wasn't every day that you got a transworld refugee trying (badly; Neo was never good at interviews and tended to spend the best part of them staring at the table and wishing he were somewhere else) to impress you enough to secure a job.

And then there were the paparazzi who had discovered an easy target in Neo, a target yet to reach the level of cynic jadedness and escape ability that plagued most experienced celebrities; his first run-in with a gang of maliciously over-enthusiastic paps had seen them chasing their scared and confused prey all the way back to the Reeves residence, where unspoken rules kept them off the property and backing away as Neo stumbled through the front door breathless, disoriented and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The footage had hit the major tabloid sites within minutes and made the curious online world privy to Neo's panicked attempts at getting away from the blindingly merciless flashes of camera bulbs going off in his face.

Neo had not asked for this life, if anyone even did; unlike him he had no reason to be subject to the same scrutiny and intrusion of privacy that haunted his every moment outside, and soon Neo barely left the house at all. He stayed in his room. He had his computer, he had his Internet connection. That was all he needed, that was all he wanted – a place away from the trauma of the real world, a place where he could perhaps lose himself in cyberspace and pretend he was back home in a time before all this.

Soon Neo was no longer answering his knocks on his door; to do so would mean admitting that he existed. He went out only for water and the toilet or sometimes the TV, when no one was around, and after a while it seemed that he wasn't even eating, unwilling to live off a host to whom he was paying nothing, and so the actor took to leaving food outside his door, and that at least got consumed. The dishes were washed and the trash cleared whenever he wasn't looking – Neo's way of saying thanks, perhaps. He rarely saw him anymore, and on the few occasions he did, Neo never looked at him, gaze firmly averted, walking on to whatever in-house destination he had in mind, doing what he had to, then returning to his room.

Friendly greetings went ignored in the one-sided silence that was becoming characteristic of their every encounter, questions met with non-committal noises or – on good days – a quiet 'yeah' or 'no', never elaborated upon; and then the door would close once more and the lock would click and that would be it for the next day at least.

His lodger's presence was forcibly un-intrusive. Unhealthily so, almost. Living in his head, in his own constructed reality where everything was still okay, because admitting the repressed truth of his situation would reopen the wound and make it hurt all over again with the extremes of loneliness reserved for those who are the sole existent members of their world. No one to remember things with, to reminisce with about any memory outside the scope of three movies. Neo was the only one who remembered his childhood, his teenage years, the bulk of the first thirty or so years of his life and the city he grew up in with the clarity of the first-person perspective – a far cry from the ardent speculations of fans who scratched the surface and sometimes touched truth but mostly got nowhere. So Neo stayed in that room in his house and pretended that neither one of them was there.

More than once, the actor considered asking Carrie-Anne to drop by. But it seemed too much of a cruel joke, and so he never did.

Neo finally went out of the house one morning. He did not go far: just out of it and out the gate onto the avenue, where he hung by the wall and waited with something in his hand. Eventually a car pulled up; a man got out, Neo went to meet him, words passed between the two and things exchanged hands, then the man got back into his car and drove off.

"Who was that?" he asked Neo when the latter returned with a thick, opened envelope in his hand.

No answer. Neo pulled the wad of notes out the envelope and counted out several. Thousand dollar bills. He stuck the rest back into the envelope, closed the flap, and then held out the notes and met his eyes for the first time in ages. The familiar jolt of brief disorientation hit them both on eye contact. He blinked. Neo didn't.

"Take it," Neo said evenly. "If I'm staying here, I'm paying."

"How did you get-"

"I earned it."

He could see that there would be no use protesting, and so he accepted the money and pocketed it. "Thanks," he said, sincerely. "Who was that man?" he asked again.

"Business," Neo said, looking away and heading once more to his room.

"What... Is this legal?"

Hesitation. Then: "No."

The door closed and the lock clicked.

"...Neo?"

Silence.

"Look, I'm sorry; but, uh, I don't think-"

The lock clicked and the door opened. Neo stood in the doorway and regarded him.

"It's my life," Neo stated, steady defiance in his voice. "I'll do what I like."

"I just... I don't want you to get into trouble. Things don't work the same here. You could get caught-"

Silence. Neo's gaze dropped downwards, regarding the floor in thought.

"No," Neo finally said. "I won't. If I do, I'll... deal with it on my own. You don't, you don't need..." A pause. Neo gave up on forming the sentence. "It's my life," he said again, in not much louder than a whisper, his eyes still downcast, idly lost in the texture of the carpet.

And he wanted to disagree, to mention how he knew he would feel responsible, somehow, as he always did, and that whatever happened to Neo would affect the both of them; but that sounded selfish, and so he didn't say that, but Neo looked about to shut the door again and he wasn't quite done yet-

"Neo-"

The other's grip relaxed slightly on the door, and it stopped moving for the moment.

Say something, he thought, and whether his mental command was directed at Neo or directed at himself he couldn't quite tell. But then Neo finally looked up from the carpet, slowly, and looked at him, and there was something different about him in his eyes – a kind of quiet resignation that might have always been there, but that he'd just never noticed until now; and then, after those few seconds of unbroken eye contact, Neo said it:

"My name is Thomas."

And the door slowly closed, and the lock clicked in, and he heard the footsteps pad softly away on the other side. The closed door was firm and not open to conversation; and so he left after repeated hesitations, walking with a painful reluctance back to his own life, the sting of Neo's last words still ringing in his ears.

III. even as also I am known

Forever fills the distance between each footstep to the door, a dead weight bearing down his soul and granting stiffness to each movement. He tries to remember to breathe, tries to focus instead on the dogged refrain in his mind – just be yourself, just be yourself, the words losing meaning with each repetition. He tries to assure himself that nothing he does will matter once he's in that room. They would take over. They would know what to do. But he still can't slow his racing heart nor stop the nausea creeping up his throat.

The walls of the corridor turn featureless and grey in his mind, fading into the background against the stark outline of the door. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the actor matching his step and pace, at the same time so close and yet an infinity away. He can't bring himself to look at him, and after a while his footsteps seem mere echoes of his own.

They shouldn't have taken the car. It gave too much room for introspection and worry and eyes shut leaning against his seat in the smoothness of the ride; too much time for the full meaning of the meeting to become clear and weigh upon him. A motorcycle would have been wild and dangerous and broken the tension and taken his mind off what was to come-

"I'll wait outside."

-and he realises that they have reached the door.

He once thought that he knew fear; had seen the worst of it and could take anything else that came. Yet external threats seem nothing now, fragile, frivolous things against the horror of being known, fully known. Every action, every word, every mannerism, every expression; there will be no surprising them who created him.

He places a hand on the doorknob and turns.

The door pushes in easily, and he dares not take his gaze away from it as he steps into the room. He lets the doorknob fall away from his palm and feels the soft rush of air as the door passes by. He hears the click as it shuts behind him, and almost immediately misses the surety of something solid to hold on to. He dares not look up.

"Hello, Neo."

The voice is clear and almost uncharacteristic, its curious excitement tempered with a strange gentleness.

He takes a breath. Slowly, he raises his head to meet their eyes. He perceives two men on a couch. They could have been anybody, if not for the way he feels painfully naked beneath the scrutiny of their gaze.

He swallows to keep the nausea down and manages a nod of greeting.

He wants to move, to escape from their probing looks exposing every sin and virtue and careless thought; the way they seem to expect and then to catch every tiny twitch he makes; the small, knowing smiles that curve on faces he cannot otherwise read. He feels their eyes on his jacket and T-shirt and jeans, thrown on in an attempt to look less self-conscious than had he been more formally dressed, and wonders at which point of their lives they decided on his fashion sense.

He wants to leave, but his feet will not obey him.

One of the two gestures at the empty couch opposite them. "Have a seat."

He makes his way to it on tense legs, averting his eyes from theirs to focus anywhere else, on anything else, the wild turmoil of indistinct thoughts hurtling through his mind as he finds the couch and sinks into it, fists reflexively clenched on the armrests, and some part of him remembers the movie and remembers a similar stance far away in a hotel in another world with another kind of stranger who knew him in a different way. And he tries to relax, because he doesn't want to be a parody of himself, but doing so only seems to deepen the similarities between him the person and him the creation.

He wishes they would say something, and then wishes that they wouldn't, and then wishes that they would, because words have to be better than the piercing pairs of eyes. He hangs in the suspension of their gaze as they appraise the work of their hands; the scribbled notes and typed out lines given form and breath and mind.

They just keep staring, and after a while he gets the feeling that it's intentional.

They're just waiting for him to react, to freak out, to make a move, with none of those possibilities ever capable of being wholly unexpected because they know him, and anger flashes briefly in his mind before it is consumed once more by fear. He tries to blank them out. Concentrate on his breathing, lower his racing pulse, forget about them being in the room, pretend they are not there, just him, and the armchair, him alone, no one else, in a world that still makes sense.

#