The foot I placed on the second staircase felt as if it were made of lead. Each step required conscious will, a decision to advance toward an unknown punishment. The experience in the park had etched a lesson onto my soul: each of these levels was surgery without anesthetic, a dissection of my failures performed with the scalpel of another's perspective. And the reward for enduring one operation was simply to be strapped to the next operating table.
The ascent was strangely familiar, but all sensations were intensified. The physical exertion was the same, a constant burning in my muscles rising from my ankles to my hips. But the feeling of descent was now unmistakable, a tangible force pulling my guts into an invisible abyss. The pressure in my ears was stronger, and I found myself swallowing instinctively to try to relieve it. The air thinned and grew colder, and a slight vertigo made me cling to the bare rock wall, fearing falling upward, into the endless darkness from which I came.
There was no longer any hope that this was just a dream. Despair had solidified into a grim certainty. My only option was to keep going. My victory in the park had not been a triumph, but an acceptance. I had not defeated my guilt; I had simply admitted it was mine. The idea of what new truth I would have to admit now filled me with cold, paralyzing dread. What other memory, buried under years of self-justification, would be exhumed and exposed under this terrible light?
The staircase ended in the same way as the previous one, in a stone archway opening into a new kind of gloom. I didn't hesitate. Hesitation was useless here. With resignation as my only companion, I crossed the threshold.
The change was instantaneous and total. A violent wind struck me, almost knocking me to the ground. The air smelled of ozone, chalk dust, and the unmistakable scent of wet concrete. A chaotic din filled my ears: the howling of the wind, the furious drumming of rain against glass, and the rhythmic metallic slamming of doors opening and closing.
I was in a school hallway.
My body tensed. The recognition was immediate and visceral. The gray terrazzo floors, the rows of blue metal lockers, the fluorescent lights on the ceiling flickering like erratic strobes. It was the second-floor hallway of the Anáhuac Cultural Institute, my high school. The place where I had perfected the art of indifference, where I had learned to be invisible in a crowd.
But, like the park, this place was sick. Trapped in an unnatural storm. Through the large windows at the end of the hallway, there was no Mexico City to be seen, but a swirling night sky of a sickly violet color. Torrential rain, thick and oily, slammed against the panes with the force of a fist. The wind howled through the corridors, tearing old posters from the walls and causing the lockers to swing open and shut with ghostly violence.
I walked into the hallway, my shoes squeaking on the damp floor. Sheets of paper, old tests, and crumpled circulars danced in the air like swarms of pale insects, dragged by currents of air seeping under the doors. It was a chaos of noise and movement, but an empty chaos. There were no students, no teachers. Just me and the fury of the storm.
A different sense of dread gripped me. The park had been the desecration of a childhood memory, distant and bittersweet. The school was different. It was the setting for more recent and complex anxieties, the battlefield of my adolescence. Each slamming locker seemed like an echo of a lost opportunity, each gust of wind a sigh of frustration.
My feet seemed to have a mind of their own, leading me along the familiar route to the administrative area. The wind was stronger here, channeled by the narrower hallway. The lights flickered more frequently, plunging the scene into intermittent darkness. I approached a door with a brass plaque that read: "Academic Coordination." The door was ajar, moving slightly with the draft.
That's when the voices began. At first, they were indistinguishable from the howling wind, but little by little they grew clearer. They were shouts. Angry voices, overlapping in a cacophony of anguish. I recognized those voices. They were my parents'. And mine.
I stopped in front of the door. I knew what was coming. I wanted to turn around, run, find another route. But the lesson of the park weighed on me. Avoiding it was useless. With my heart turned to a cold stone in my chest, I pushed the door open.
The world dissolved in an explosion of light and sound.
I was no longer in the dark hallway. I was in a small, cramped office, filled with the sunlight of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, five years ago. I was standing next to a desk, but looking down, I saw my mother, Sofía's, hands, twisting nervously in her lap. She was wearing the silver ring my father gave her on their tenth anniversary. I was inside her.
Across from me, sitting on an uncomfortable chair, was my seventeen-year-old self. I saw him through my mother's eyes. The hunched posture, the defiant, bored gaze fixed on a spot on the wall, the way his hair fell over his eyes like a curtain. And I felt a wave of panic and love so intense it stole my breath. Her panic. Her love.
"I don't understand," she thought, and her thoughts resonated in my consciousness as if they were my own. "Where is my son? Where is the child who laughed, who told me everything? This stranger who sits before me, full of silent anger... how do I reach him? He's slipping through my fingers like water."
"Your grades have dropped in all subjects, Kenji," my father, Haruki's, voice said, sitting next to me. I felt my mother flinch at the harshness of his tone.
I saw my teenage self shrug, a gesture of indifference that, from this perspective, was an act of incredible cruelty.
"I don't care," my past self replied.
I felt my mother's frustration like a burn. "No, you don't not care. You're suffering, and you won't let me in. You don't know how to ask for help, and I don't know how to give it to you without you feeling like I'm attacking you."
"You can't not care!" she exclaimed, and her voice came from my lips. "We're talking about your future. Your father and I have sacrificed so much to give you this opportunity..."
And then the perspective fractured. With a dizzying pull, I was no longer my mother. Now I was sitting beside her. I was my father. I looked at my hands, larger, knuckles marked by years of work. I felt the tension in his neck, the stiffness in his back.
Now I saw my teenage self through Haruki's eyes. I saw a young man who didn't understand the value of effort, the fragility of success. I felt my father's deep fear, a fear he had never shown me. The fear of a man who had left his country, his culture, and his family to build a new life from scratch. The fear that his son, born with the advantages he had fought so hard for, would waste everything on a teenage whim.
"He doesn't understand," my father thought, his thoughts a mixture of Japanese and Spanish, a storm of logic and anxiety. "He thinks this is a game. He thinks life gives you infinite second chances. In my world, you only got one. If you lost it, that was it. How do I make him understand discipline, gaman? The importance of enduring, of persevering? My strictness isn't anger. It's a shield. I'm trying to give him the armor he'll need, and he sees it as a cage."
"You need more discipline," I said, in my father's calm, firm voice. "You'll spend less time with your friends and more time studying. We'll confiscate your video game console."
I saw the spark of fury in my teenage self's eyes. "You can't do that!" he yelled. "It's my life! You don't understand anything! You just want to control me!"
And with another violent pull, I was back in my own perspective. I felt the wave of righteous anger, the feeling of being a victim, of being completely misunderstood. The world shrunk to my own bubble of resentment. Their worries were noise. Their fear was control. Their love was a noose around my neck.
"I hate you!" I screamed.
The word hung in the office air, ugly and sharp.
I saw the pain on my mother's face through my own eyes. I saw my father's impassive mask, a mask I now knew concealed deep fear. And in that instant, experiencing all three perspectives at once, the memory shattered.
I returned to the darkness of the school hallway. The storm raged outside. I was trembling, not from the cold, but from the shock of the revelation.
It had never been about my grades. It had never been about the video game console. It had been about their fear, born of love. And my pride, born of insecurity. We were three people in a room, speaking three different emotional languages, each screaming into their own void, convinced the others were deaf. There were no villains in that office. Just a perfect storm of misunderstanding. A tragedy of unspoken words and misinterpreted feelings.
The howling of the wind changed. It became sharper, and the paper flying through the hallways began to clump together. Sheets of failing tests, disciplinary notes, summons for my parents... all the paperwork of my teenage failure united, swirling in small vortices that patrolled the hallways like sentinels.
They weren't like the shadows. They didn't feel malevolent, just chaotic. A whirlwind of paper rushed past me, and one of the sheets left a thin cut on my cheek. The pain was small, but sharp. These were the thousand small wounds of that family cold war, physically manifested.
I understood the nature of this level. There wasn't a single guilt to accept, as in the park. This was more complex, more tangled. It was a system of pain for which we were all responsible. There was no enemy to face. The enemy was the storm itself, the chaos of miscommunication, the fury of clumsily expressed love.
I didn't know what to do. I couldn't fight the wind. I couldn't reason with a paper tornado. I felt overwhelmed by a new kind of hopelessness. With Yuki, my mistake was an act of omission, something I could have done differently. Here, the conflict seemed inevitable, a clash of tectonic forces between my growing need for independence and my parents' primordial fear of losing me. How do you "win" a level like this? How do you accept such a tangled and painful truth?
With the cut on my cheek burning, and the echoes of the three versions of that fight reverberating in my head, I took a hesitant step into the dark, endless hallway. The paper vortices danced in the distance, whispering reminders of my anger and their fear. The storm raged. And I was right in the middle of it.