Jay lies on his back, shoulders pressed into dizzy stone, and looks up, finally, from the edge of the canyon, but it still doesn’t look right.

            He closes his eyes.

            He opens them.

            Like turning the computer off and on again.

            But no. It’s still wrong. The stars look like echoes. Like a picture of a picture of a picture. 

            So, this is it, then.

            He breathes out, slow and deep. The air tastes bland, temperature-controlled. The stars prick against his eyelids. Two thousand miles. His phone mangled in a sewer grate. Thirty days in his car. And this is it.

            It began with a candle. Green apple, framed in glass, about the size of your fist. The flame wasn’t bright enough.

            Jay spent hours staring at it. He studied its warped colors, its crooked lashing movement. Flames were brighter than that—the same color, generally: snarling yellow and orange, a lick of blue if you were lucky—but this was wrong. Its shade was muted. Its contrast was turned down. He blew it out and re-lit it. The flame crackled under his gaze, shimmying, showing off, but the color stayed dulled.

            He hid the candle under the couch.

            Then the walls started to look wrong.  

            He could have sworn they were a brighter shade of blue. His mother insisted she hadn’t changed them.

            Jay went from room to room, checking the walls. The more he looked, the more he started to hate her. She was lying. She had changed all the colors in the house to just slightly duller variations—she must have done it over the fall, when he was at university—and now she was lying to him about it.

            The next day, the candle still wasn’t working. Its flame looked flat, boring. He flicked on the gas stove, and those flames weren’t right, either. They’d traded roaring blue for something pale, withered, pathetic.

            He endured it for a couple weeks. It seemed like the right thing to do—to give the color a chance to yawn, stretch, and emerge brighter than before. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe it would snap back one day. In the mornings, he kept his eyes closed. He counted to himself. One, two, three, and then he would open his eyes, and the walls would look right again. Like turning the computer off and on. One. Two—

            But it never worked.

            Jay can’t stand the sky, or the canyon, or the blank dry taste of the air, so he gets up and he walks back to the car. Streetlight blares down over his shoulders. His breath is sharp, but it’s measured. He knows how to track his breath, how to manage his lungs. It’s not a matter of panic anymore. It’s not a drop into endless dark, the surging howl of height, terror. It’s sitting at the bottom of a rabbit hole, looking up. It’s the bottom of everything.

            He stops in the parking lot and raises his hands in front of his face. The dark is grainy, pixelated. His hands do not look like his hands. They do not look like anyone’s hands. They are foreign and strange in the dark.  

            A couple of weeks after the candle incident, Jay went camping. He needed to get away from the walls. His boyfriend, Ty, came with him, but Jay didn’t let him make a fire. They ate cold bologna sandwiches by the firepit. Gusts of wind sent ash into their faces.

            Ty tried to help. He wandered around the campsite and scooped up handfuls of leaves—scarlet, yellow, orange. Jay held the leaves and looked at them and tried to feel something, tried to focus on their warm crunching texture, their musty mountain scent, the vibrancy that must hum beneath the surface, but still, the color seemed faint. He handed the leaves back to Ty, trying not to cry.

            They curled up in the tent. Ty smelled like ash and honey. Jay stared up at the tarp ceiling, studied the wrinkles that spread down the fabric. Ty reached for him. Jay pushed him away. The tent was beige, a terrible color to begin with. Now it was unbearable.

            He slept outside, clutching leaves. In his dreams, Jay exhaled paint. He sweated it. It dripped out of his ears. It filled up his throat and crawled into his lungs. The walls rang. The air pulsed. He could have sworn it was once like this in waking life, too.

            Jay lowers his hands. The evening is soft and quiet, pressing in. He wishes it would grab him with some urgency. He wishes it was cold out, that the air had some bite. He wishes a stranger would emerge from the sewer grate and beat the living hell out of him.

            He breathes. In, out.

            He unlocks his car and slips into the driver’s seat. A ragged map is taped to the dashboard. Flagstaff, Arizona, is circled in dark red. Jay leans his head against the steering wheel and tries to think. He’s made it here. After all those weeks of driving, he’s made it here, to Flagstaff, to the Grand Canyon, the most spectacular view in the United States, and he has sat beneath the stars and looked up, and it still doesn’t look real enough. What is he supposed to do now?

            He reaches into the backseat and retrieves a can of beans. He eats them cold, and it tastes like metal.

            After the camping trip, Jay went to the doctor. Actually, he went to several doctors. They tested his vision, put him on antidepressants, and screened him for schizophrenia. But the tests came back fine. His vision was 20/20 with no colorblindness. He’d never had a hallucination—only the starving, ever-expanding dimness.

            All the antidepressants did was loosen his panic. He drifted through the day a bit more easily. But it didn’t matter. Nothing was bright anymore. Nothing was visceral, roaring, real anymore. It was like he lived on a television set.

            And then he found the poster.

            It hung on the wall at the Mast General Store. The first bright thing Jay had seen in months. The paper screamed auburn, the cliffs careened across the page, and the text stood tense in a line: GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK. He bought it then and there. Paid too much, then unrolled it in the parking lot. It looked a bit less bright outside of the store. Jay rolled it up again. He wouldn’t look at it anymore; it wasn’t worth the risk if it had lost its color. All he needed to know was that he had it.

            On the drive home, Jay started thinking. The poster of the Grand Canyon had seemed bright. Really bright. And that was just the poster.

            When he got home, he started packing.

            The streetlight pooling in his lap, an empty can of beans in the cupholder, Jay sits with his eyes closed. His heart is not pounding. It is a distant, aching chug. He thinks about calling Ty. It has been weeks since they have spoken. But Jay’s phone is at the bottom of a sewer grate somewhere in Idaho, the screen crushed in. And even if he got a new phone and remembered Ty’s number, what is he supposed to say? I made it? I’m safe? I’m sorry? Are any of those things even true?

            Jay leans his head against the steering wheel. His chest hurts. Crickets shriek outside the window. They sound tinny, like they’re being played through an ancient sound system. Maybe he should kill himself. He imagines how real it would feel, to die. He imagines standing at the edge of the canyon, staring down into the dizzying height. He imagines that if he stepped forward, he would never stop falling. That he would colonize each frame and live there for decades, that he would sprawl suspended over the vast descent forever, arms outstretched, shedding pixels. Tasting everything.

            He locks the car.  

            Ty had offered to come with him. He was the only person Jay spoke to before leaving, and he still believed that he was an exception to the dimness.

            He thought this because Jay lied to him about it.

            He thought this because Jay said things like, “You’re the only thing that still looks real,” and “You could never seem less bright to me.”

            Jay didn’t have the heart to tell Ty that he looked two-dimensional, too—half-there, not as bright as he used to be. He didn’t want to tell him that the dimness had diffused into everything. That there were no exceptions.

            Jay left North Carolina with a duffel bag, a map, and a box of canned food. The radio played hits from ten years ago. Looking out the windshield made the dimness worse. It exacerbated the feeling that he was looking through a screen, watching a movie of himself, so he pinched his arms and let the ring of pain wake him up, convince him he was here, here, he was still here. 

            He drove for days at a time. Slept in grocery store parking lots. Woke up with his head full of cotton.

            After a couple days, the windshield wasn’t the only problem. Looking at his phone set him off, too—the feeling of dipping into a screen, forgetting where he was, locking into a virtual space. It felt like a physical place that he could fall into and never get out. It felt like it had happened already.  

            He smashed his phone and threw up on the side of the road. Glass cackled under his sneakers.

            It was night when he arrived at the National Park. The woman at the gate made him pay thirty bucks to get in. But the money didn’t mean much. He’d made it. He’d made it. And if he could just look at the canyon, if he could just stand at the edge and open his skin and let the beauty, the brightness, pour, pour in, it would reset him. It would fix him. The world would look real again.  

            The woman thanked him. He eased on the gas.

            He doesn’t sleep much. But when he does sleep, he sleeps deep.

            He dreams that he is stuck inside a dream, inside a dream, inside a dream. He is terrified of waking up. He doesn’t know what he’s waking up to, but he has a feeling it’s bad.

            He dreams of a video game, inside a video game, inside a video game. He doesn’t know how to play. He doesn’t remember how to exit.

            He dreams of a movie, inside another movie, inside another movie. None of the plots make sense. They are boring, but he’s frightened that they’ll end before he’s ready.

            He dreams of paint, wet and sticking to his fingers. He dreams of Ty, so bright he can’t look at him. He dreams of falling, the canyon howling and divine.

            He will not kill himself. He knows this, even in the dreams. But still, he dreams of falling. He dreams of death’s brightness.

            Morning clambers through the window. He wakes up drowsy and hot. Tourists are laughing somewhere outside.  

            He keeps his eyes closed.

            He counts. One, two, three, and he will open his eyes again, and the color will be back. Like turning the computer off and on.

            His throat burns. He will not cry. He will not. He will open his eyes on the count of three, and he will wake up from every dream at the same time. He will wake up from dreams he didn’t even know he was having. He will wake up, and everything will look right again. One, two, three, and he will be home again.

            He counts.

            The tourists yell and push one another. A crow screams in the parking lot. Something hot is leaking down his cheeks, gathering under his chin. But it doesn’t matter. None of this matters.

            He counts.

            One. Two. Three—

*