The Artificial Mirage by T. Warwick

drove down the empty streets lined with cars and sporadic streetlights and parked in an alley a few blocks away from his apartment building. Walking back to his apartment, he stopped to take a breath of the exquisite combination of desert winter air at dusk and car exhaust. Feeling a presence, he looked over his shoulder and looked into the eyes of a camel neatly fitted into the back of a small Nissan pickup truck. The camel possessed the same lack of urgency he’d learned from the desert. He wasn’t startled at all. He’d never noticed their thick, long eyelashes before. They stood staring at one another for a solid twenty seconds.
    He passed the Filipino VR café with its trail of residual hubbly-bubbly smoke trailing out of the entrance and went up the stairs and through the door. His nest of blankets on a thin camping mattress was waiting for him. Finally, there was the comfort of the AC that he kept on the highest setting—and a sense of safety. He could feel traces of cold radiating up from the concrete, centimeters below. The cooling concrete seemed to drop hiscore body temperature an additional degree or two if he focused on it. He looked up at the ceiling as a silent rendition of a war in a jungle between shiny metallic robots and an army of his ex-girlfriends was taking place. The lush, verdant green colors of nature exuded a sense of comfort and home and belonging. He fell asleep as it began to rain and the robots became lethargic in their movements.

11
    T he power went out just as Keith opened his eyes. He lay on the antique Turkish carpet in his sitting room on the seventeenth floor of a crumbling black concrete hotel built in the early 2000s. The near darkness of a cloudy and smoggy day shone through the heavily tinted windows, and he enjoyed the newfound silence until it became apparent there was no backup power. It was one of the few hotels in Jakarta still stuck on the electric grid. Dependent. He hated it. After easing himself off the carpet, he fumbled for his contacts on the desk and grabbing his phone, he felt his way to the bathroom. He turned on the projector and set it up on the sink so he could put the contacts into his eyes. A dubbed Japanese horror animation was playing, and he laughed at its overt attempt at spookiness. Once his contacts were in, his world came alive with index charts and weather reports. The JAX was down. He flicked away a list of messages from his ex-girlfriend that appeared at the bottom of his vision surrounded by pulsing white light. He was past due on child support and the account that it was drawn from was empty, but they would survive without his money as they had survived without him. His passport still had a few years before it needed to be renewed and his personal life was put under scrutiny, so it wasn’t critical yet. He grabbed the bottle of cognac on the desk by the window and took a satisfying gulp. Moving carefully to the white marble foyer and grabbing hold of the large wooden Batak carvings to get his bearings, he removed his key card from the slot. Since it was battery-powered, his remaining air-conditioning balance of nearly thirty hours was projected just above the console on the wall. He made for the door. The emergency projectors shone a moving path with arrows down the hallway to the stairs and down all seventeen flights of drab gray concrete dimly illuminated by yellow industrial emergency lights. This was going to seem luxurious if he couldn’t figure out how to pay off the withdrawals being made in his fund. Tracing a line with his fingertips on the cool concrete wall, he felt the remembrance of it as something he might have done as a child. A manwith the trademark bruise in the center of his forehead from excessive praying was walking on the far right with his wife, whose tightly stretched floral-patterned hijab with a pink background and a short bill made her look like a startled exotic turtle as she clung to his side as they walked down slowly,