From the Branch

Fiction: A spark ignites between two troubled young people on New Year's.

Let me tell you about Jocy and Martin. They met once in 2003, both wailing, as Jocy was carried into a room of carbogen gas and rash-red Martin was carried out. Carbogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen mixed, gives subjects the false autonomic feeling of suffocation. Hearts rush, pupils dilate. The program directors had assured the Eldens and the Hartfords that their respective children needed such exposure to rid them of psychic disturbances caused by the invasion of Iraq. So, while the toddlers screamed, their hands briefly touched in the white of that windowless hallway, whisked separate ways out of view. They would not touch again until their mutual twenty-fifth year.

Jocy Elden was ninety-seven pounds on midnight of New Year’s Eve, 2024, and she was proud of it, too. She had waited all day to eat or drink, to make sure the digital display on her East End Toronto apartment’s bathroom scale read nine-seven-point-oh. Her toes stuck to the glass as she took her picture, vibrant and AI-crisped. She wondered, examining the light on her bony feet, how much she could get from one of those rich fetish guys. Five grand was her floor, she thought. No, a thousand. No, nine-hundred-fifty American. That was enough to buy the Hermes scarf she’d been keeping in her cart all winter season.

The idea left her. She had plenty of money. It was more the speculation on her market value that had raised the question in the first place. Jocy walked to the main room of the eighth-floor studio and took another selfie in her exercise mirror. Thigh gap in the leggings looked solid. Under-eye bags, too purple to post. Maybe with a crop, no face or feet. Yeah. That would definitely do it.

“New Year Same Workout.” Champagne and palest girl runner emoji.

Send to story. Lock phone. Drink a ton of water. Her treat at noon had been one cold glass and a pack of dried nori. The saltiness of the latter had annulled the relief of the former. As she chugged, explosions startled her, until she remembered that blowing things up was how normal people celebrated New Year’s. She preferred to ring it in seeing an old vow through.

Dinner, or breakfast, was whatever was left behind the three rubber ice trays in her freezer. Frozen gnocchi with cream sauce and peas—not a microwave meal, technically, if you do it on the stove. She fed herself as slowly as she could, to draw out the pleasure of breaking fast. Neither her Twitter nor Reddit circles had understood such a feeling, one reason why she’d nuked both accounts last year after getting banned from /r/1200isplenty. They didn’t deserve a person like her, anyway. She was special, just as she'd been told her whole life from age two to escape at seventeen. Even if she’d disavowed the woo-woo stuff, she still hung on to a fleeting shred of the praise. She could use all the praise she could get.

On the other side of town, at UToronto’s grad housing, Martin Hartford made out with a Polish exchange student and hated every second of it. Get out of your head. Get out of your head! He could not. She was pretty enough, tall enough, fair enough on paper. Her lips were dry, marred by a horrible silver piercing from which he falsely inferred an unloving father. Her teeth probed at him, almost clacking his own, as if to say, “Hey! Pay attention.”

Everything showed on his eyes. She did not care for Nietzsche, and he did not care for whatever it was she had said her master’s was in. “What a waste of a good body,” her frown seemed to tell him as she disappeared into the crowd.

She was wrong. It was a perfect use of a body. His hours of sculpting, refining in the gym, were not an act of vanity. They were meditation, praxis, the doctrine of the overman scribed in muscle as a testament of will. It was all one package, and it was hers to take or leave. Good riddance.

A Solo cup spilled somewhere behind him, splashing his legs with unidentified liquid. Revolting. He ran hot, like a high-performance machine, and the lipidic insulation of a body-packed room filled him with dread as his cheeks went flush. He felt the illusion again, as came with panic, that he was about to suffocate. He did not know why. He did not know why these people were laughing, or what could possibly be funny. Was it him? The butt of the joke among his peers again, as he’d been since the lycee days of high school?

He had to get out of there, and he did.

Jocy was on the move as well, taking the 501 streetcar toward the nightlife of Queen Street West. A pack of guys at the end of the car gave her the creeps, and at Broadview she ducked out early into the safety of a bar. ‘The Comrade,’ cursive neon read in ruby. Commie chic was a fun enough aesthetic. It reminded her of the six teenage days in Manhattan when she’d actually felt like a part of something cool.

The inside was more fur trapper hipster than Warsaw Pact. It seemed reasonably safe to leave her coat on the rack beside the door. She planted herself at the bar next to couple after couple, endless cheugy millennial couples with DoorDash silhouettes, and felt like the last living young, fresh thing who was destined to die alone. At least the bartender was hot enough. Beard, vaguely punk ink, apron. Big smile. She warmed a moment at his smile, glad for the affection, then cooled when she saw the mason tip jar adorned with chibi Baby Yoda between them. His affection was a product. She would not be the gullible john.

Drink ordered, drink drunk, drunk girl drank drink. She giggled at herself, head like honey, doomscrolling. A text from situationship Kyle lit up her open phone screen like a flare. At least two people saw it all, Kyle’s pouty-faced smirk and Western U t-shirt and what was below.

“in the OC but would rather be in jocyyyyy happy ny babe.”

Yikes. Yikesyikes. The bartender could not stifle his laugh at her embarrassment. “My boyfriend,” she lied. “I’m dumping him,” she added, unnecessarily. “He doesn’t like to do what I need him to do, the right way.” Even more unnecessary. “I put a lot of work in, you know?” Jocy, what are you doing? It’s been one neat scotch. Just stop! Stop the train! No more words!

“He should respect that,” said a vaguely Neanderthal young guy sitting just to the left. He was buff, cut, maybe the only one in the place with a body fat percentage as low as hers. His words had come out so plainly, almost autistically, that they didn’t even feel like a come-on. It was, though she didn’t know him, Martin Hartford, not-yet master of philosophy and carbogen chamber kin.

When their eyes met he became aware of her body and she became aware of herself. She wore a blue tweed skirt, short above the knee such that her lower thighs stuck to the leather of the swiveling barstool. The thigh gap she’d worked so hard on didn’t really show well seated, she thought with chagrin. Maybe at ninety-five pounds it would. Her crop top was tight, her abs were firm. From there it was a near-flat washboard up to her pursed lips and hazel, mouselike eyes.

Maybe he would like what he saw. Some guys did. Maybe New Year’s morning would be spent in the embrace of this stranger.

“I’m just saying, he should be putting in more work,” the guy stumbled on, “he looked pretty average to me.”

“Are you always this clueless?” asked Jocy. Somewhere in the dredges of bratty post-post-irony she had mixed up cool and mean.

“Huh?”

“You’re supposed to act like you didn’t see anything. Because I didn’t mean to show you. Like in poker, an accident.”

The guy, curiously, seemed neither defensive nor apologetic. He looked at her with a puzzled stare. “You’re supposed to tell someone, though, when they bleed in poker,” he corrected. “Want to buy me a drink?”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a starving grad student.”

“You don’t look starving.”

Now he was aware that she was aware of his body, too. “I,” he said, “I skin and eat the deer on campus after dark. Raw, like ancient cat. Then I crawl around naked on the quad and hiss at sorority females, to work abs. Like a plank but scarier.”

It was such a straight face that she took him at his word, revolted. Then she found a glimmer in his eyes. A joke. Obviously. Obviously! She cackled.

“That’s really hitting you,” said Martin, tapping the chapsticked rim of her glass with his nail as she recomposed herself. In the rouged light he couldn’t see her flush.

“I’m a lightweight,” she said with false humility.

“Martin.”

“Jocy.”

“I know. I saw the text. Jocy with a lot of ‘y’s.”

With two fingers, Jocy signaled the barman, then tapped her glass. He poured another single of Laphroaig for her, neat, and Martin watched. “Scotch girl?” he asked.

“No. Bourbon.”

“That’s scotch.”

“Yeah, but I decided just now as he poured it to be a bourbon girl for a while.”

“Is this some sort of siren dialectic trickery?” asked Martin. “I’m on to your ways.”

Jocy didn't give him the pleasure of repartee. “What are you having?” she asked. “My buy.”

“Monster vodka,” he said to the bartender, who obliged without balking.

Jocy thought she misheard, then made a gagging face. “Revolting. I will not pay for that.”

“It’s aesthetic nonchalance,” said Martin. “It’s good now to distill the extremes of the declassé and the aristocratic. It’s the middle that’s death. You’re showing your age.”

“My age?” Jocy scoffed. “I’m twenty-five. How old are you?”

“Same,” Martin grinned. It was like all her intonations of offense bounced harmlessly off his chest. “Cheers to twenty-five.”

Their glasses touched, fingers barely grazing for the second time in their lives. He sipped the fluorescent green in his glass as if it were cognac, and let out a sigh. “Want to try?”

“I don’t waste my calories on sugar,” said Jocy.

Martin shrugged. “Alcohol metabolizes into ATP same as carbs.”

“But alcohol gets me drunk, unlike radioactive alien gamer piss sleazecore nostalgia syrup.”

“Edgy, so edgy,” said Martin, tsking her disdain. “What do you drink when you’re not getting trashed? La Croix?”

“Last night I brewed two gallons of ten-flower dragonfruit assam iced tea for the week,” said Jocy.

“Holy twee cottagecore Pinterest femcel moodboard,” Martin laughed in turnabout. She wanted to slap him. Maybe she should have. Was everything a girl does in life condemned to be a trend, a joke, a punchline?

“Maybe I just wanted tea,” said Jocy. “And I’m not cottagecore, I have a studio in The Beaches. You wish you could afford my building.”

Martin bowed, palms out and down, as if in the presence of a satrap. He chuckled all the while. “I didn’t realize I was in the presence of an illustrious East End pod person. Hail.”

“It’s not clever to show that you can sort every person into a derisive little caricature,” said Jocy. In lieu of a slap she kicked his shin, her shoes a good foot from the ground on the high-top stool. “We all know you can be snide. Good job. Now try saying something beautiful and true.”

Martin leaned back. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”

Jocy scoffed. “Speaking of edgy…”

Martin almost pounced with zeal, leaning in with such a passion that she jumped. “Do you see!” he said, scaring a Gen X couple beside him. “Do you see how we’re trained? Even you! Here, asking for honesty, begging, you squirm away in the face of it. It’s not edgelording, it’s the voice of the heart. In this case, Nietzsche’s heart, but still.”

Somewhere on the lip filler coast of California they were getting ready for their own midnight.  She wondered who Kyle would be kissing. “I’m sorry,” she said, into Martin’s eyes. “You were only doing what I asked. I’ve been untethered lately.”

“Untethered.” Martin lingered on the word with a pang of Pavlovian pain. Then he brushed it off. “How did the tea turn out?”

“My third-best attempt, out of twelve,” said Jocy. “It’s meditative. I do it and I put on this YouTuber who used to be an army sapper and he blows things up on his ranch with different homemade bombs. I think I would be good at that.”

“Making bombs?”

“It’s a lot like brewing tea. You need the right balance.”

Martin, loosed from his fortress of brooding by alcohol and caffeine and niacin and sugar and a girl, waxed a bit on his own pastimes and passions. He talked about reading Houellebecq in the French, hitting squat PRs, and hiking the trails of the Czech Republic with no phone, to the horror of his mother. At his mention of loving winter, Jocy balked.

“I hate winter,” she interrupted. “I get S-A-D so bad.”

“The snow is a muffle when it sticks,” said Martin. “It lets me pretend everyone in Toronto has finally shut the fuck up to let me think in peace.”

“Think about what?”

“I need to learn Greek. I need to better my body and soul. I need to read more Spengler. I need to pick up more pears and walnuts for my salad. I need to get the right sear on my flank steak.”

“I wish we could take turns batch cooking,” said Jocy. “It’s hard to find someone else who eats right.”

“We probably have similar macros,” said Martin, “portions aside. But it’s like an hour to get to The Beaches from grad housing. Where do you work?”

“Remote.” Jocy finished her drink and ordered two Eagle Rare doubles, neat. They rung up at $36.20 a pour. “To sincerity.”

“This is about to sincerely be the most expensive alcohol I've ever drank,” said Martin. “Should I be worried about protecting my spiritual virginity?”

“Virginity?”

“Spiritual.”

She had no idea what that meant, but they toasted and drank and the room began to blur. “Don’t worry about it. I’m overpaid,” she said, embarrassed by the fact. “I do SEO.”

“Succubus Ensnaring Our-souls,” Martin attempted, drunkenly. “You are an agent of the great culture eater.”

“I’m just a lonely girl who used to trauma dump on tumblr.”

“If you’re lonely, get a roommate,” said Martin. So many times, in his gestures of exasperation, his hand came an inch from her arm. “Be agentic.”

“I live in a studio,” said Jocy. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Me?” said Martin. Another smile rose from him, less controlled and more boyish. “I do well in tight spaces.”

“I keep a strict schedule.”

“I’m early to rise,” he assured, “but… I am a man of ascetic decadence.”

Jocy scowled, somehow blithely. Her cheeks felt warm, and for the first time in weeks she was able to forget the world. “What does that possibly mean?”

“I’m scandalously indulgent in my simple pleasures,” said Martin. “I take my coffee in the Turkish way, in recline on a rug of moderate size. I walk alone to clear my head. I indulge in a cigarillo only to punctuate moments of joy. I must have my books on hand wherever I live. When the urge strikes me to stroll in the night or engage in labor of the body I always submit.”

“Wow,” said Jocy. “Are all philosophy majors this bad?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Martin. “I’m a comparative literature major, philosophy post-grad. For that reason, by the way, I’m afraid I have to stay on campus the next few years. Shoulders to rub among the literatiat.”

“Why aren’t you with them tonight?”

“Because I loathe them!” Again his projection of voice scared a couple nearby. Jocy had lost track of Kyle’s midnight, and she didn’t care to find it. “They live in a fantasy world. If I could burn it all down I think that would be an improvement overall, for humanity. They exist within their own little pointless ego nexus.”

“Ego nexus.” Jocy repeated the phrase like a winter chill had blasted through the door and into her bones.

“It means—”

“No. I know what it means. It means you went to MindTree.”

Martin halted. He was sober in emotion all at once at the name, even in the depths of bourbon stupor. “I did. Did you?”

“Preschool to junior year,” said Jocy.

“Pre-k through eighth for me,” said Martin, sizing her up now as either kindred victim or foe. “Did you make ascention? Are you inducted emerald?”

“I got emancipated by a court and escaped,” said Jocy. “I never tell anyone that.”

“Well, good,” said Martin, raising a toast. “Fuck those guys.”

“I’m resolving not to curse,” said Jocy, “but fuck those guys.”

They toasted the denunciation and finished their glasses, heavy now. It was a tossup whether Jocy could stand if she rose from the bar, so she anchored herself on its wooden edge and looked deep into Martin Hartford’s gaze.

He faltered. “MindTree was—”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Jocy. The spell they had cast on each other before the revelation was too pure to die so young. “Talk about me. Give me a compliment. An insult. Whichever you want. I’m vain.”

Martin’s eyes switched. She saw herself take up the place in his mind’s eye that had just been filled with pills and lab coats and acuity renders. His jaw relaxed into comfort. “You have a vintage sort of face,” he said, “like an old Playboy girl. The kind they don’t make anymore.”

“I know,” said Jocy. “I think it’s because my mom had me at forty, so I was waiting around a long while in the ether to be conceived and my features all fell out of fashion. You know, you look more like an ancient German wildman than a scholar.”

“I’m going to need glasses soon,” said Martin. “That should help. Glasses or LASIK.”

“Oh, don’t get LASIK,” Jocy shuddered, “I saw on TikTok this girl got dry eye from LASIK so bad she was begging for eye removal, and when they said no she killed herself.”

“And you trust TikTok for your medical decisions?” Martin laughed with derision. “Kids these days.”

“You’re my age.”

“And I’m not afraid of LASIK unaliving me because of some TikTok creepypasta.”

Jocy swallowed. The TikTok about the LASIK suicide, true or not, had terrified her for days and nights when she’d seen it. Now, revisiting the nightmare in the context of the young man before her, the dread of it all threatened to collapse her with tears.

He moved swiftly to hold her, like a loved one, as the sobbing came without warning. “It just makes me so scared to think of you making a mistake and ending up in pain,” she said with wet cheekbones to his chest. “After all we’ve been through. We escaped. We deserve a good ending.”

“I’m getting sick of these people,” Martin spoke into the conditioner scent on the top of her head. “Let’s go outside.”

Jocy’s jacket awaited her, unmolested, and Martin braved the cold with just a sweater and a hardy disposition. The night was low on travelers, dark and brisk, and a long row of empty al fresco tables lined Queen Street’s cordoned-off parking. Martin lit a cigarillo from his pocket, staring at the ionic columns of the Ralph Norton Community Center, and as it burned Jocy broke into smile.

“What?” he asked.

“This means you’re in a moment of joy,” said the girl.

“I guess I am,” said Martin. Then he watched her wet smile turn back somber. “Why are you crying? I won’t get LASIK, I promise.”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Jocy swallowed. “It’s, I, I’m too broken to be good for the kind of guy who’d be good for me. So, either I settle for someone I can’t love, or I find a good one and disappoint him forever. I know it’s not the worst problem to have, but it gets me sometimes. It’s getting me now.”

“Fuck that,” said Martin. “Who told you that? Some therapist?”

“A therapist would never say that—” 

“But she’s still going to tell you you have trauma, that you need to pay to come to her to fix it, but you can never fully fix it, just like fucking MindTree, just like those fucking acuity renders, every level of ascension, it never ends, until you hate yourself. Fuck all of it. You sculpt yourself into being every day, through the pain, you become your ideal.”

“Improvement through pain,” said Jocy. “You’re the one that sounds like MindTree.”

That stung worse than a knife in Martin’s gut. He reeled, throwing the cigarillo into the snow with a tortured child’s agony. “The difference is freedom,” he said, eyes reddened, almost falling, “we do it for ourselves, our way, not for their pleasure.”

Jocy watched him act out his helpless rage, unable to look at her. All the while she swallowed back her own tears, everything she’d put off in nine years of trying to be normal. She’d known on some level this had to happen. She just hadn’t known where or when.

“He’s still running it,” she said.

“Khurana?”

Jocy nodded. The cable car stopped, warm and inviting, and opened its doors. They did not board, and after ten seconds it moved on. “I check their website every month or two, like a psychopath. They just let in a new cohort of seven kids, all pre-k.”

“Did he…” Martin’s voice cracked, throat tight, staring at her now with a haunted shame. He could not say it. “…with you?”

She nodded. Her ears rang. “You?”

“Yeah.” Martin bowed his head. His teeth gritted. “We could get him, now.”

Jocy’s nose was red from cold. She’d been down this path countless times in her head. “Those other people tried and he basically disappeared them. He’s got a gazillion dollars, and more in India, and he’s got all the city government on his dime.”

“No, I mean, we could kill him.”

“Kill him?”

Martin clasped Jocy’s face with both hands and put his forehead to hers. “Jocy, I almost got run over by a truck, walking to the cable car today, but I didn’t, and I was so hung up contemplating death that I missed my stop and ended up here and met you. Maybe this was why, so we could do this, so we could stop him doing what he did to us to anyone else, for good. That’s how you kill your trauma, whatever you call it. It’s your soul giving you the will to power, to revenge.”

“Not just Dr. Khurana,” said Jocy. In the rush of agency she no longer felt the cold. “In the morning, before the cohorts show up for stabilization, when him and the whole team are there on the twentieth floor. We blow them all up.”

Three branches split off into darkness from that moment in the snow on Queen Street. Down the first, agents of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police broke into Jocy Elden's apartment and discovered twelve pounds of precursor materials intended for a homemade bomb.

The chemicals, bought anonymously from a Chinese vendor, had been randomly swabbed by American customs officials at the port of Long Beach, en route to Toronto. Through texts and GPS data, Martin and Jocy were both implicated, charged under Section 81 of the criminal code. They had no family willing to help them during the trial, so Jocy hired a private lawyer to represent them both in federal court.

Their history at the hands of the private educational institution was considered as a mitigating factor, but neither one was willing to flip on the other as the primary culprit. As such, with all their premeditated acts considered as a whole, the bombers were treated as a Bonnie and Clyde couple by the tabloids, and sentenced by the judge to twenty years each behind bars.

A second branch ran near that one, more thorny and more brittle. Jocy ordered the materials, all carefully researched and selected on a computer she had bought on Facebook Marketplace. After three weeks, everything arrived without incident. There was no waver of commitment in her mind or in Martin's.

On April 3rd, 2024, just four months after their meeting at The Comrade, Martin and Jocy disguised themselves as service workers and ascended to the twentieth floor of the Banning Capital tower with a large bomb on a rolling pallet. They left the pallet in a supply closet, which they both remembered from desperate days trying to avoid injections and shocks. No one thought to look there as the senior staff of MindTree assembled for their first morning meeting.

Jocy and Martin fled without waiting to watch. Two hours later, when the bomb killed thirteen MindTree staff and gruesomely maimed six more, they were already boarding their flight to Paris. In Paris, they took a Deutsche Bahn train to Prague, paying no fare and avoiding the ticket inspector while wearing disposable flu masks to beat the cameras. Twice, when they were about to be cornered, they got off and waited on freezing platform steps for the next eastbound train to arrive.

From Prague, they continued into the countryside, making up elaborate stories about their pasts whenever a local inquired. After two weeks of investigation, the bombing was digitally tied to Jocy, who was placed on the RCMP’s online list of wanted fugitives.

No direct effort was ever made to pursue her abroad by the Mounted Police, although the case was forwarded to INTERPOL and a red notice was dispatched. Macron’s Gendarmerie, deeming the case unrelated to Islamism and unlikely to result in future violence, barely followed up. The trail was lost in Strasbourg, and in the end Jocy Elden and Martin Hartford settled into an anonymous, undocumented life in the Czech countryside that almost resembled nonexistence.

Back on Queen Street, in the space between them as they held each other close, a new sapling broke through and became a branch of its own. They went home together, back to the studio apartment that Jocy had never realized felt empty without him. He dropped out of his master's program, which would have been a horror to his parents had he not already cut them off in a fit of rage a long time prior. That year, he got a job in tech like her. Then he got fired, licked his wounds, matured a little, and got another one. In time, they had something like a life.

On this branch, they did nothing to stop what went on on the twentieth floor. They did nothing to help the children of the current cohort, or the next one to come. It would be many years before a documentary crew looking for a salacious story finally cracked the whole thing open. But Martin and Jocy were together, in love and in wit and in pride. As they waited, ears freezing, for the next 501 to arrive, this was the branch that they reached out together and chose.

---

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