The stuffy blue summer was followed by a dark damp campfire-smelling autumn. Reed and I didn’t become friends because neither of us saw the point in it, and that’s why we liked each other. We shared a common goal: to learn more about creatures made of glass.

Reed’s empty room looked like a laboratory. We used four glass partition walls to construct some kind of aquarium walls, and filled it with glass and crystal dinnerware that we bought on sale at the Neman store. In the evenings, the vases, jars, decanters, flasks, and bottles were illuminated by the studio’s fluorescent and LED lights.

Reed didn’t teach me anything, we just spent time together looking at the silhouettes in our lab. He was smart about spending the money from my backpack, maintaining our modest lifestyle based on a lean diet, three liters of water a day, walks in the square near the house, and exercising. We hardly spoke. There was no need to talk. All the time was taken up by contemplation.

Eventually, in addition to the silhouettes in the glass, I began to discern diffuse iridescent light and spiral lines floating in the air. Reed noticed that my attention was drawn to more than just silhouettes, and explained that different spectra of wave and electromagnetic radiation became available to my vision. When I realised that I could intersect waves with one another , shorten and lengthen them, change their shape and color, I literally flew out of my mind and succumbed to every fantasy that occurred to me. Once in a while, bringing myself back from the haze of fantasy, I saw Reed stubbornly sitting and staring into the glass aquarium in complete concentration. I did not know and never asked what he saw with his eyes. Every time I fell asleep, I was immersed in a warm bath of suspenseful enveloping dreams. In the morning, when I saw rainbow cobwebs in the corners of the room, I smiled at the beauty I saw in a state of cold and lonely happiness.

Before, I could not say that I understood Reed’s personality. I could not unravel a single rare emotion on his face. But the more waves and electromagnetic effects I saw, the clearer Reed became to me. Now I can tell when he is tired, struggling with an inner rush and desire to cognize more than he is capable of. I see when he doubts himself and his abilities. And when he is inspired and lost in the depths of glass. He was my only equal while the rest of the world with all its people, emotions, experiences and things became nothing but furniture for me.

I was passionate about the wave-like obscurity and could not tear myself away from contemplation because I understood how to create twinkles and flickers. I switched my vision from ultraviolet to infrared and observed the clipped web around the router.

We experimented with the waves and placed electrical devices around the aquarium, brought the equipment up to the glass and watched how the hue of the silhouettes changed from silver to shimmering blue. Once we plugged in hair dryers, modems, and wi-fi amplifiers, the room began pulsing with wave patterns and ornaments.

My abilities kept expanding. My acoustic perception also changed. I began to distinguish the melody of hundreds of church bells coming from somewhere under the water. I heard the sound of approaching digital data on radio waves and other vibrations at different frequencies. That’s why Reed often played something on the xylophone. The melodies from the aquarium were something I was willing to follow. My parents, lovers, friends, and acquaintances seemed like a distant fable from a fairy tale. No worries or pain. No desires and illusory self-identification. An epic loneliness that didn’t make me fearful. I was forever with the voice in my head and my whole being accepted such world order. And, when, one day, I heard that the silhouettes invited Reed over there, I was not upset.