Let Them Watch: Up in Rook's Apartment: The Ember Files - Log 13
To read the previous log, Log 12, click here.
Rook Wetherell sat on his couch in Koreatown. The place was spotless.
It wasn’t just tidy. It was scrubbed to the bones. He’d spent six hours cleaning it like an operating room. Baseboards. Grout. The inside of the stove. The smell of bleach made his eyes sting.
This always happened on the upswing. The early manic stage when he believed control was possible if he just scoured everything hard enough. If he could keep the space clean, he could keep the mind clean. He knew it wouldn’t last. It never did. In a month there would be smelly take-out boxes stacked in the sink and weed ash on the floor. Layers of hair trimmings from his hit-and-miss beard maintainence gummed up in black and grey piles in the bathroom sink.
But for now, the apartment was clean.
He sat there, arms crossed, foot tapping, watching the floor dry.
The apartment was dead quiet except for traffic rumbling outside and the fridge kicking on and off.
He was angry.
Therapy had turned into something he didn’t sign up for. When the Institute first recruited him, they told him it was experimental. They said people with bipolar weren’t broken. They hinted at special wiring. Talked about creative potential. Said they were researching ways to use those “unique hemispheric properties” for advanced modeling, even quantum research.
They made it sound like he wasn’t sick. He was selected. He believed them, having listened to a great many podcasts on quantum everything.
But Moraine didn’t see it that way. Every session circled back to meds and sleep. No more weed. No more 10 gallons of caffeine every evening. No one wanted to talk about the reason he signed up at all. Why he cleaned until his fingers cracked. Why he stayed up for three days writing lyrics no one would hear about women who never wanted to see him again.
He looked around the room. Down at his secondhand couch. Stained but clean. Record collection lined up on a cheap IKEA shelf. Alphabetized.
The rent here was a joke for LA. Which still meant it was robbery. He liked Koreatown because it had real food, real bars, places he could disappear. It wasn’t Silver Lake with influencer murals and five-dollar oat milk foam. It was unpolished - the perfect hideaway for a working musician.
He thought about last week’s session. He tried explaining it to Moraine. He called it spectacle. How everyone sold an image of freedom. Digital nomads posting neon street noodles and “authentic” hostels. Travelers pumping out blog posts about how “fun” everything was. All of it designed to sell ads and fake enlightenment.
Moraine just nodded and asked him how that made him feel. It made him feel insulted. Rook didn’t mind traveling light. He liked that he could move at any moment with no real ties to anybody. But he didn’t want the spectacle. He didn’t want to turn his life into clickbait about minimalist living.
He wanted truth. That sometimes you move not to run away but to keep from falling apart. That the cleaning wasn’t wellness. It was survival. That the mania wasn’t sickness or magic. Just a fact of his brain he refused to sanitize for anyone’s report.
The Institute would note the improvement. They’d log the spotless apartment. The Institute would watch for the next swing. They’d wait to document the collapse. He knew the pattern better than they did. But he was getting tired of playing the patient. They wanted data. They wanted to dissect him for their study. He could give them something worth writing down.
He thought about Mara. Always the neutral observer. Always pretending to be objective.
Mara and Wyatt. Wyatt. The famous act. The charisma turned sour. The washed-up frontman playing thoughtful badass while the world moved on. Rook could see exactly what that was. Mara wanted to fix him. Wyatt wanted to be worshipped. They deserved each other.
He tapped his foot slower now. What would happen if he pressed on that crack. If he made them see each other the way he did. Not the Institute’s special case studies. Not an exercise in healing. Just two fucked-up people screwing each other for comfort and attention. They liked to pretend it was something deeper. He could peel that lie back for them.
He imagined saying it out loud in a session. Describing them clinically. He could make them all squirm. He could make them admit it. Make them watch themselves.
He smiled without meaning to. They all wanted to use him. The Institute for data. Mara for meaning. Wyatt for validation.
Fine.
He’d give them what they wanted.
But it would be on his terms.
Not progress.
Planning.
