Episode 4 - Turning

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Welcome back. Last week, I told you about the conclusion Aishi and I came to regarding the line that brought us together and the plan that came after that. I also told you about the Wizard and used him to explain the… occasional surprises that can come from the people we talk to online. I also revealed that I still beat myself up for not asking Aishi about her age at the bare minimum. Because internet safety. So there’s that.

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There’s that and really only that, it would seem. As for everything else… well I don’t know what I thought this podcast would be. I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish. This isn’t a missing person’s investigation. It can’t be. The random online friend you had from over a decade ago is not the one who should be reporting you missing. Because how could they even know that you’re missing? And I don’t know enough about her to be able to compose any sort of profile for the rest of the world to use to find her. If she wants to be found. No matter how many people listen to my voice, we won’t find any trace of her. I guess there is a chance she’s still using that handle: Aishi44713. But maybe she’s not and oh boy, somebody is in for a rough time if they are.

It was explained to me once that investigations have to start with premises. You have to know something or ideally several things to be true beyond debate before you can make your inferences. Never mind tie them all together in some neat little conclusion. In this supposed investigation, I wouldn’t have had all the necessary inferences for a conclusion. No investigator does. And that is a part of the process. You take what you have and lay it out. And once, you see where the holes are, you can then seek out those other pieces to make the other inferences you need to build a foundation for a conclusion. 

I only have a couple premises, if that. I have scraps. If you look at it that way, this would seem like a waste of time. I’m surprised that I don’t have a slew of one-star reviews across the internet.. But I swear this isn’t nothing. 

It’s not an investigation. It never could be. I don’t… I don’t know why you’re listening to me.

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At first, his visits only grew more sporadic, but in time, the Wizard logged off the Forum for good. It happened in the coming months after we devised the Water Plan. Or that’s what we called our pursuit for the line (quote) “The room is dark. The man is crying. You are crying too.” (End quote). Crying being the source of water, which we hoped meant washing away the distortions the text responses seemed to be based in. Aishi, if you remember, saw water as a symbol for purification. 

I didn’t try to argue. And looking back, even crying touches on that conclusion a bit. There is something cathartic about a good cry. It can make a weight feel a bit lighter, even for a moment. 

But that’s not the point. Or not the one you might be thinking of. 

I can hear what you’re asking, but my hearing may not lead us down the path you would like. No, we weren’t sure where the Wizard had gone or why, I guess would be the better phrasing. The guy who had seen the Wizard's band once caught another show of theirs after the Wizard disappeared. The positions on the band were all staffed, but not all the bandmates he had seen were there. I think he said the drummer was the one who was different. But he left it at that. He couldn’t really ask about it. During their prior concert, he hadn’t spoken to anyone there. And he still did not know where to begin.

And how could he? What could I say? Hey, I also frequent that online forum. You know the one. The one about a game that doesn’t make sense where you often complain endlessly about your still ongoing divorce. Or… How could he even figure out which one was the Wizard. I suppose yelling out “The Wizard” was an option. Just not a very good one.

The short of it is that anything that raised more questions needed to be avoided because he wouldn’t have had a good answer. So no, we don’t know if the Wizard left his band. We really couldn’t. 

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If I think about my stats for Twitter, I think one tweet survives for every ten I attempt to draft. And that includes Twitter replies. And you would assume that those statistics would mean I have an incredibly witty and insightful Twitter feed, but that is definitely not true. I think those tweets only survived because I didn’t give myself a chance to strike them down, deleting them from the platform forever when I see what I think is the error of my ways. 

Maybe I’m wrong about that. The other night I wanted to tweet about my cat attempting to jump onto the shower curtain rod and missing because of course I had to deal with this. He’s got more curiosity than sense, and a shower curtain rod is no place for a cat. To his credit, though, he might have actually stuck the landing, but one of his paws hit a curtain ring, it rotated, and he slipped. 

The fall wasn’t that big. The emergency vet I took him to said he was fine, told me what to look for just in case, and sent us home where my cat was just as moody as you would expect a cat coming home from the vet to be. I had a thousand reasons to believe he was okay, but obviously I was still concerned. Incredibly.

Concern, fear, anxiety: all those things. Whatever form this demon may take, it’s incredibly isolating. We are sitting in a world defined by a worst case scenario built up of the bricks of the things we have seen. I wanted to know that someone else had been in that room and could help me--from the sound of their figurative voice alone--come out of it. Twitter isn’t great for a lot of things, but it can help with that.

I spent a few minutes composing a Tweet. And despite the character limit, I actually was able to cover quite a bit of ground. I explained what happened, that he was fine, but I was still scared. It was a call to the void for some sort of comfort. Calls like that don’t have to be all that eloquent; it only had to meet the requirements of its purpose, which it did. But I didn’t post it. I couldn’t bring myself to. And I still don’t understand why.

Does it surprise you to know that it would have been on Delphi’s account?

(Extended - Music fades out and new music fades in) [TW - discussion of misgendering]

Aishi can be a male name in Japanese. In Japanese, the exact nature of any name can vary depending on the Kanji selected to represent it. If you look at the different for of Aishi, though, the underlying theme is love. And maybe there’s an irony in that.

I know we all used female pronouns for her, but maybe we were wrong, and they just never bothered to correct us. Or maybe English and all its difficult nuances were somewhat unfamiliar territory. And a mistake was not recognized as one for quite some time. 

Mistakes can become bigger than us, can’t they? I guess that’s the premise that I need you to believe for this next point. That something that is a part of and critical to us can be taken away from us not out of malice but because people genuinely didn’t know. We had no way of knowing. And maybe at first you didn’t realize the mistake was happening, but then the boulder had too much momentum, and you didn’t know how to stop it. Or you didn’t have the vocabulary to stop it. It was a different time then. It doesn’t seem like it, but it was. Just slight. Just enough.

Misgendering someone can cause so much hurt that I can’t believe it would have happened in a place like the Forum. We all had our problems, but we were a team in this. How could we do that?

[End TW]

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I use Reddit, and before anyone jumps in with any sort of complaint, I mostly use it for the subreddits about cute animals. My favorite is r/catsstandingup which is just a subreddit devoted to cats on their hindlegs, where all the comments on the posts have to be the word cat with a period at the end. 

Communities on Reddit can be about almost anything, and I find it comforting that this particular subreddit where people gather around something cute and just sit in witness of it is a place that I can. It’s the most consistent presence I can muster online.

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April 11th

No one has gotten line yet. Aishi and I are back to drawing board. We need to find why we got the message in the first place. Maybe it is time. Not time of day. How long did we take between clicks.

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Loading times were super hit or miss back then. And that’s with the caveat that everyone had lower standards. For the Funhouse Hallway, we couldn’t control that variable, so if it did matter, we were screwed. Aishi and I had the best chances of replicating the route. But it didn’t help that I was in the process of moving. And different homes in different locations probably have different internet speeds. I mean, ISPs aren’t known for being consistently great, to phrase it politely.

Of course it didn’t help that no one would have thought to note the time between their clicks when going through the Funhouse Hallway. Nobody thinks about their own personal click rate at all; that’s such a trivial thing to make a note of.

However the one bit of hope we had was Aishi’s observation that we had likely gone slower after a certain point, after whatever line felt the most familiar to us.

For both of us, it was after the first “You see nothing.” We planned out our steps accordingly.

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This podcast isn’t entirely about Aishi. Or the Funhouse Hallway. Is it? I can’t entirely tell anymore. However, I feel a certain pressure to be the one in the spotlight because I am the thread that links all of this together. But I don’t know what you want me to say. 

I was a teenager when this all went down. I was starting at yet another new school because we were moving again. My family moved a lot. And that might be a detail you want to ask about. But thinking that or assuming that is being a bit presumptuous, isn’t it? Of me. It’s being presumptuous of me. You don’t care about that,do you?. There’s no way that you do.

In the finite nature of the world immediately around us, we have to make choices about what matters. I don’t want to bog anyone down with irrelevant details about my life. I did that with Aishi all the time. And that didn’t even work out for me. It didn’t help me heal any of my discontent. In fact, it might have guaranteed a new wound would open up in time.

Because now, I spend so much of my time wondering if Aishi’s eventual disappearance from my life was something I caused. Did they just get so annoyed and so irritated with me, that I never bothered to ask about them, or that I was such a needy person or a burden that they left their online presence forever just to get away from me.

I don’t know why they left. And in the hole, this doubt, my insecurity fits rather nicely, don’t you think? Or that’s what I’ve come to think.

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April 13th - Four days until move.

Tried to play the game while packing. Only playing game. Got the message again. I wait after it says “you still see nothing.” Count to five then click. “The room is dark. The man is crying. You are crying too.” Left or right. I go right. 

“It’s raining. The man is crying. You hear a bang. You are crying too.”

Then the game crashes.

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Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show, please leave a review or donate to the show’s Ko-Fi account.