I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

#SaveTheOA Campaign

Pivotal Resources/Actions Video
CALL NETFLIX EVERY CHANCE YOU GET!
^{UK: 0800-096-6379 | USA: 1-866-579-7172 | AUS: 1-800-585-7265 | Brazil: 0800-761-4632 ? | France: 08.00.91.78.13 ?}
SIGN THE OFFICIAL PETITION [@87k!] | REQUEST THE OA PART III-V
Weekly Campaign Update Newsletter Sign-up!
Charity OA Sticker Patreon!
Campaign LinkTree to share with (new) fans!
Map of OA fans for IRL collaboration! Add your location for reference!
www.watchtheoa.com | www.savetheoa.org | www.theoaisreal.com

Top of Consciousness

• It's time for #HallOAween! OA Themed Pumpkin Carving Contest! A chance to win exclusive #SaveTheOA merchandise! More info in link and down below in "Major OAwareness!"
  

  Deadline: November 3rd!
  

• We want MORE!! Join #FierceMonday and spread/post this video message EVERYWHERE! Let's be heard!
  

  Video Download
  

• FilmDaily Bingewatch Award: Best Netflix Original of 2019
  

  Voting allegedly ended the 25th, but it's still up--you can still vote if you want to chance it
  

• Old Kite Project! More info below in 'Major OAwareness!'
  

Campaign Calling | Communities | Contact

"It's a matter of will, it's always a matter of will."

This is a campaign to save a show that's quite simply, but not quite so simply, much more than just a show. This is a campaign for any age, and anyone in the world can help, in any and many ways. This is a campaign about planting seeds that will sprout only enormous enough as need be. And if Netflix persists--they will sprout enormously, indeed.
We may be casting a beautiful net, but our advantage is that we're only trying to catch one beautiful thing. And while it being quite very far from implausible, if this actually were somehow impossible, well... I hope you remember what the OA asked of us on that particular matter!
Before moving on... please allow just a brief primer. Think of how important The OA is to you and why you're interested in this campaign. And consider a fresh dose of awareness for The Bystander Effect--the psychology of hoping that enough people do something that your individual help is unnecessary. This is a psychological illusion, and I think that if you're reading this and truly want more seasons of The OA, then you need to become familiar with any tactic to potentially accomplish that. You, even you, need to do all the things.
This is a campaign that will last as long as it needs to, and I hope you will be doing exactly what everyone else is doing, which is simply all that we can!

“If we don’t try to help then we’re not who we say we are.”

Campaign Social Media

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1766443917014390/ | https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheOABrasil1/
Twitter: @saveoaupdates
Instagram: SaveTheOAofficial
YouTube: SaveTheOA
WhatsApp [Brazil]: https://chat.whatsapp.com/invite/KkQ8znbgVxI5IlwjqqlFJH
Reddit: And this subreddit of course!

Live Action Hub: Discord

Discord is a team chat program. Many of us fans were unfamiliar with it before this campaign (including myself), but it's mostly intuitive. Just another platform that can be utilized in communication/collaboration between fans.

-If you've been kicked from Discord, it may be due to inactivity--please request another invite

• Request Invitation

PM either arie_lle | WillsMonsters | colinfirthfanfiction | AndPeggy- | or me!
We obviously want a large community, but we obviously don't want it to get out of hand with open invitation. That said, our barrier to entry is low--if you're a fan and you want to check it out, then we'll let you in. We're no Discord experts, but we're doing the best we can to cultivate organized channels and proficient roles that people in Discord can enroll.

-Please be patient when requesting an invite as we may not be checking Reddit constantly. If you do not hear back from someone after 24 hours, a gentle reminder is always appreciated! And you can always PM someone else on the list if they're more recently active.

• Role Requests Needed

Social Media Experts & Drones | Discord Experts | Marketing/Advertising Experts | Event Planners/Coordinators | Professional Graphics/Video Artists | Musicians | Crafters | Engineers | Programmers | Etc.!

Other Contact

general email: [email protected] event planning email: [email protected]

GoFundMe

GFM #2! - STATUS: Funded!
(9/30: General Update!)

We’re buying a giant octopus kite today (Old Kite), which costs $500. The remaining funds that haven’t been used toward ads or the website (www.watchtheoa.com | www.savetheoa.com) are going toward OA Day, which is a long and arduous thing to plan. Follow @savetheoa on twitter for more frequent updates!

(10/19: Old Kite Update below!)

Funds beyond what we need for the project will be split in half, with half going to our next project (keeping details under wraps, but it's being put together by some fans in the campaign who're engineers/architects/artists--think of a physical structure that you'd see in an art exhibit)-- and the other half will go to an agreed-upon charity!

^{GFM #1:}

TIME SQUARE Billboard: 8/28-9/2 | LA Billboard: 8/28th-9/3 | Donation: A21 ($350)

Major OAwareness

----- IRL Events
The OA Themed Pumpkin Carving Contest

Are you ready for a spooky HallOAween? To make our effort to save The OA a bit more exciting, this year, for Halloween, the #SaveTheOA movement is offering exclusive merchandise for the three best pumpkins.
Submit a picture of your marvelous creation by November 3rd to be in the running. Remember, you've got to be in it to win it!

1. Choose Your Design Will it be the Rose Window? Old Night? OA? Something else? Get creative!
   
2. Carve Your Pumpkin Whether you're a carving expert or this is your first attempt, we want to see it!
   
3. Take Some Spooky Snaps We'd like to see your pumpkins in the light and lit up in the dark. Bonus points for originality. ;-)
   
4. Submit Your Entry Submit your design using the form at the bottom of the new website. You can enter as many different pumpkins as you want.
   
5. Share Your Pumpkin Post your pumpkin on a social network of your choice using #HallOAween and tag @SaveTheOA in your post(s)!
   

On November 4th, we will list your submissions and open the lines for public voting – the three pumpkins that come out on top with the most votes will win our exclusive mystery items.

Old Kite Project!

Here he is! Our intention is to have it go cross country in the US, starting from one coast to the other and visiting as many locations in between.
We would need as many people involved as possible willing to fly and/or transport the kite to maximize use and visibility and also to reduce shipping. 5 People minimum to fly mainly for safety, because it is fairly big.
We think this is a really good way to positively impact the whole movement, to remind people we haven’t gone away and to get everyone in the community involved in some capacity. If it takes off, maybe we can ship it to different countries! But without everyone’s involvement and participation, the project can’t happen.
If you'd like to be involved in flying Old Kite, contact us via Old Kite's Instagram or Twitter.
(Update: 10/19) Finally reached California! If you've signed up to fly Old Kite in CA, check your email for further details. If you haven't signed up for Old Kite - in California or anywhere in the US - then please send a message via Old Kite's official twitter or instagram (and follow us, while you're there!)

Old Kite Twitter | Old Kite Instagram

----- NETFLIX -----

-----Request The OA III-V at Netflix's website
-----Call Netflix incessantly: THEY HAVE TO LOG THIS INFORMATION DOWN--IT ADDS UP

^{UK: 0800-096-6379 | USA: 1-866-579-7172 | AUS: 1-800-585-7265 | Brazil: 0800-761-4632 ? | France: 08.00.91.78.13 ?} (You can call Netflix directly via their mobile app using only data wifi/4G so that it's a free call)

-----Write & Send Letters/Postcards

To: Blair Fetter / Alison Engel / Cindy Holland 5808 SUNSET BLVD., 8TH FLOOR LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 90028

-----Fax

Netflix HQ Fax #: 408-540-3737 free: www.faxzero.com, www.faxburner.com, www.getfreefax.com

-----Chat

You can also chat to Netflix, but please use this as a supplement to calling them, rather than a substitute, if you can help it.

----- RATINGS -----

-----IMDb

-Rate Series, as well as each episode in Part I & Part II

-----MetaCritic

-Series, Part I, & Part II

-----RottenTomatoes

-Part I & Part II

-----TvTime

-Series, and can rate individual episodes!

----- SOCIAL MEDIA -----

-----Netflix Flooding

Respond to every Netflix post on Twitter, IG, FB, YouTube, etc., and mention The OA. This is important because every single person who sees literally any of their posts will become aware of The OA!

-----Fan Awareness

You'll find many of our fellow fans out of the loop and in the wild. Please share infographs and sources such as the websites, Google/spreadsheet calendar, this stickypost, etc., so that they know their mission and can join the coordination!

-----OA Proselytizing

Search for Twitter users looking for what to watch next (e.g. "what do I watch now," "what do I watch next," "what should I watch next," etc.). If/when you spot anything like this, please take a minute to hook them on our beloved series! Grow our fanbase when we need numbers the most!

-----Big Players

Comment on social media accounts / websites of Big Players (Variety, HW Reporter, other publications, etc.), especially those who remark on TV/Netflix

Radio: send a message/plea to DJ's. Suggest starting off their program w/The OA main theme, a SVE track, and/or mention #SaveTheOA w/mention of recent and future efforts.

-----Aggregator Awareness

Do what you can, where you can, on sites like this one, Digg, or even imageboards such as Imgur, Pinterest, etc.

-----Alternate Platform Awareness

Apps like Whisper, Tinder, Grindr, etc. are all social platforms where you can sneak in some OA awareness!

-----Veterans of our Suffering

Try to recruit fans of other cancelled shows for help--we all share an overall goal in awareness for not cancelling good stories

(Social Media Tips)

USE TWEETDECK or HOOTSUITE IF YOU NEED TO PLAN TWEETS IN ADVANCE!

-Passive Reminder: search for twitter users looking for what to watch next (e.g. "what do i watch now" "what do i watch next" "what should i watch next") and let them know: The OA! -“Old” hashtags will STOP registering as trending when there aren’t new spikes in usage. They also may be “muted” (and not seen) by Netflix. -Even if a tag hasn’t been muted or spam tagged, apparently new hashtags take less time to get to trending because the spike in activity is over a shorter span of time. -Write only ONE HASHTAG (#) PER TWEET! -Do NOT (Re)Tweet with a TAG (@) ALONE--always write something else with it! -Do NOT include the SAME tag MORE than once per Tweet! -Spam-filters are sensitive to terms such as "WTF" or "SPAM," try not to use these. -Try to wait a few minutes between Tweets. -More information here. -Instagram ONLY: add tags like #whattowatch #tv and #netflix so new viewers might stumble on it (LachlanAbbey)

----- LIVE-ACTION OUTREACH -----

-----Airdrop

When in a crowded space (bars, colleges/schools, the mall, movie theaters), Airdrop a trailer of "The OA" to whoever has airdrop open.

-----Stickers

If you want or have access to print OA sticker to hand out, you can order FREE UPS shipping labels with this link (may have to create an account). It's the last two options you want, then just print it out.

-----Posters/Flyers

Learn The 5 Movements!

• Learn the Movements

What're you waitin' for? The more videos we get, the more we can do with them to help the campaign! If physically capable, get learnin'! The OA asks us to be vulnerable, and many/most who've submitted videos can attest they were uncomfortable putting themselves out there to the world. You're not alone, and there are no bad Movement videos when they're done with perfect feeling!
These movements can be easy to underestimate. Demonstrate the power of this story by becoming vulnerable, doing a mad/beautiful dance, and putting yourself out there for the world. Especially if a local Flashmob happens near your location!
Once you have them memorized, consider sharpening them up with additional practice! The more accurate your movements are, and the closer to your own personal best ability, then the more powerful the implication will be of your time and effort--and thus, your passion! Make your passion shine bright!
Submit your video to Official Fansite! -www.theoaisreal.com

• Tutorials/Examples

-Tutorial by Jess!
-Example by Cast: Mirrored
-Example by Cast: Mirrored + Slowed Down
-Broken Down, Gradual, and Inclusive Tutorial by Ewanni! Movements 1 & 2 | Movements 3-5

Campaign Soul

CHARITY | #GiveOA

----- Sticker Patreon
Become a Patreon to get stickers and contribute to Charity!

Each month we will have a new sticker featuring OA fanart from a new artist and all profits will be donated to a new charity each month. New stickers will be the design of each artist & may or may not feature the words “Save The OA.”
These artists are donating their creativity. We are donating our time. Would you donate your money to help a worthy cause, bringing home a bit of OA swag in the process?

----- OA Calendar!
Order an awesome OA calendar with art by our own fanbase!

Oct 1 Update: You can still get this calendar, but you will have to buy directly through Shutterfly and no funds will go to the campaign. Expect a future update for all the money and where it went for full transparency!

----- Charities with general association to OA's story
ALS: The ALSA | Human Trafficking: A21 | Blindness/Vision: The Helen Keller Foundation, The Fred Hollows Foundation | Children: International Social Service, Kidpower, Labdoo, Nat. Center for Missing & Exploited Children | Survivors: Redress | Humanitarian: Humanity First | Environment: National Resources Defence Council, Friends of the Earth International, Ocean Conservancy | Reading/Literacy: Milk and Bookies, Worldreader | Misc: Film Aid

-If you are making any donations explicitly due to encouragement from this campaign, please credit the campaign by associating your donation with the hashtag #GiveOA on social media!
-Don't see any charities you like or prefer? Try https://www.charitynavigator.org/ to verify any other charities you're interested in!

----- Upcoming Charity Events
10/19: A21 Walk

Even if you plan on donating to another charity this month, please still consider joining A21 for their Oct. 19 Walk by locating your nearest location.

----- Misc. Donations
Donate Hair!

Long enough hair to donate? Consider it in general, but also consider doing it for The OA!

Other

Have stuff in general you can donate? Goodwill/Salvation Army/local Church/etc. are usually decent options to consider!

COMMUNITY SERVICE | #GreenOA

Every Sunday! Do anything you can throughout the week, and upload to social media on Sundays! Accumulate Green activity for the show by using hashtag #GreenOA on social media!
----- Pick Up Trash

Parks, Beaches, Highways, even just your neighborhood/local area!

----- Go Green

Plant a tree/trees! Make a habitual/household improvement that conserves resources in any way!

SELF BETTERMENT | #ShineOA

Start a chain reaction of inspiration, by starting with yourself! If the OA has really impacted you in terms of wellbeing, please share it! Accumulate Self Betterment to associate with the show by using hashtag #ShineOA!
----- Drop Negative Habits

If you have the passion, try to use it for eliminating any vices/unhealthy behavior (Be responsible if you cut any serious addictions)

----- Add Positive Habits

Can you improve in any accessible ways? Consider routine exercise, exploring interested hobbies, working on relationships, pursuing academic/artistic aspirations, meditation, etc.!

Campaign Achievements / Buzz

www.TheOAisReal.com - fan website!
Glance of the Iceberg

10/23: RadioTimes.com Sci-Fi and Fantasy Champion 2019 10/17: Fan Video for Brit's character! Happy B-day Nina! 9/21: OA Calendar! 9/12: Teaching Movements 3-5 outside Netflix HQ! 9/10: Netflix Mass Cancel! / Teaching Movements 1-2 outside Netflix HQ! 9/7: São Paulo, Brazil Flashmobs #3! Luz Station 1 / Luz Station 2 / Ibirapuera Park 1 / Ibirapuera Park 2 9/4: Fansplaining Podcast w/Claire! & Violin Blast outside LA Netflix Office! 9/2: Hollywood Rainforest Donation! 9/1: São Paulo, Brazil Flashmob #2! 8/30: Sticker Patreon! 8/26: NYC Netflix Office Flashmob! / TS Flashmob! 8/25: São Paulo, Brazil Flashmob! 8/22: Flowers to Netflix! 8/21: Beautiful picket in LA! We're really doing this thing, folks! & Nerd-O-Rama Podcast on the show & campaign! 8/18: French rooting us on! 8/15: We got Bob Vance from The Office to promote Phyllis and The OA! -We're pushing up MetaCritic and IMDb ratings! Keep it up! -Articles Galore!

Source Credit

^{Major Work In Progress!
-Discord: arie_lle -GFM #1 Wizard: laserwolf2000 -Spreadsheet Calendar: dotvommm, colinfirthfanfiction, cupcakepie -Campaign Websites: colinfirthfanfiction & DC:ScifiVision -Fan Website: till/evan + syzygy__5 & Arielle -Original Campaign Overview/Action-List: DC:WanderTruant -TweetDeck/Hootsuite Recs: leo5354 & sluttylicious1 -Letter thread: adamArriva2001 -Fax: LaceySaysHi, SanctusTalos & KneelToTheSun -OA proselytizing: nohinjonson, DC:JulesVictor -Big Player Spamreach: DC:destinyvision -Radio Input: robkoz3150 -Sense8 Advice: LindsayFos18 -Stickers: irenarose -Sticker Patreon: Amanda & Erin -Watchtheoa email: colinfirthfanfiction & cupcakepie
Stickypost Updates: 10/29 ~2:55am MT
Stickypost Issues/Recommendations? I'm quicker to check Discord & Twitter:}

^{DC: ListenToTheWind @ListenToTheWin4}

^{Leave Your Front Doors Open}