Solitaire

I guard my sleep time determinedly. I understand I need 7-8 hours each night in order to function well and maintain my health. While I always read in bed for a couple of minutes before I turn out the light, I usually have a strict time limit for doing so. With “Solitaire” I threw my personal reading rules out the window. I read at stoplights, during work breaks, at my desk during lunch and LONG past my “lights out” deadline in bed.

Ren/Jackal was innocent, convicted, sentenced (to hell I might add), served and released. But she was innocent! The rest? Error, never ever once corrected. It might have been tacitly acknowledged, but not officially. How fucking real world is that? I kept expecting some mighty conspiracy to be uncovered, Ren forgiven and a massive public apology delivered as the true criminals were brought to justice. That's how it works in books, right? But instead only one person really maintains her faith in Ren/Jackal. Sure it's one person who really matters, Snow. But Snow faces a drastically altered Ren/Jackal too. There is no guarantee at the end of a happy ending. Just of a fresh start. Again, so real world.

But the riveting horror of the book is in Ren/Jackal's sentence. VR solitary confinement. How many of us could survive being stuck alone in our heads for YEARS? No books, no TV, no internet, no other people. Just the body you're in and the brain driving it. That exploration makes “Solitaire” so riveting. And horrifying. As Ren battled her crocodile, I could only imagine my own monsters. What they would like and how well I would perform in the face of them. How many of us really even see our demons? They appear briefly on the edges of our vision. In fear we snap on some music or video, open a book or seek out conversation with a stranger, banishing those demons time and again to the fringes. They're there, herding us through our lives, but rarely vanquished or even acknowledged. Ren found herself with no other recourse than to finally turn and face her monster. And her victory gave her peace, she found within herself the ability and comfort to be alone and silent. Her escape from the VR cell to the uninhabited VR world allowed her to roam free and explore who she was without anybody else. That's powerful...but also isolating.

Ren can now be truly alone without fear, but the others who occupied her life before have no place in it. They were a part of her monster and excised with it's vanquishing. The exercise of erasing all the other people and experiences in her life allows her to move forward into the next phase. But on returning to the real world, those blank images are harder to maintain. Snow reemerges, but their relationship must be built anew with the new Ren. And glimmers of others leak through, too, in the end.

I don't feel like Ren's story is completely through. On one hand, I hope for more from her. On the other, I'm not sure how any follow up to her story could live up to the power it's beginning hold for me.