Chapter 4: Chapter 4: The Invisible Screen
"Garcia?"
He turned. His father stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room with one hand on the frame, watching him the way a man watches something he does not understand yet.
Garcia’s mouth was still half open from the shock. The system window hung in the air in front of him, the mission text glowing against the dark panel, so close that he felt he could touch it. To him it took up half the room. He looked from the panel to his father and back, and a cold feeling spread through his chest, because his father’s eyes were not on the panel. They were on him.
His father’s gaze moved slowly across the room. It went to Garcia, then to the coffee table lying on its side, then to the empty air where Garcia had been staring, and then back to Garcia again. There was nothing in that space for him to find, and his face showed it.
"What are you doing?" his father asked.
The question was quiet and careful, with no anger in it, which somehow made it worse.
"I—" Garcia stopped. He cannot see it. The realization arrived all at once and left him with nothing useful to say. He raised one hand and pointed at the panel anyway, because part of him still could not accept that it was invisible to anyone but him. "There’s a screen. Right here. You don’t see it?"
His father did not answer right away. He looked at the spot where Garcia was pointing, held there for a long moment, and then turned back to his son with an expression that had started to tighten.
"There’s nothing there, Garcia," he said.
"It’s right in front of me." Garcia heard his own voice climb and could not stop it. "It’s a window, it’s floating right—" He swept his hand through the air where the panel was, and his fingers passed through it the same way they had before, meeting nothing. From the outside he knew exactly what that looked like. A grown man waving his arm through empty space in his parents’ living room.
His father’s jaw set. He had come home three months ago to a son who barely ate, barely slept, and barely spoke, and now that son was pointing at a wall and insisting there was something on it.
"Sit down," his father said. "You’re not well."
"I’m fine."
"You’re pointing at the wall."
That was when Garcia’s mother came in.
She must have heard the raised voices from the back of the house, because she appeared in the same doorway a few seconds later with a dish towel still in her hands and worry already pulling at her face.
"What’s happening?" she asked. "What’s wrong?"
His father did not exaggerate, and he did not soften it either. He simply told her what he had seen.
"I found him talking to himself," he said. "He’s pointing at the air and saying there’s a screen there."
The words were calm and exact, and they landed on Garcia’s mother like a weight. Her eyes went straight to him, then to the empty space his father had described, and Garcia watched her try to find whatever her son was seeing. She found nothing, the same as her husband, and her breath caught with a sharp gasp.
"Garcia," she said, and her voice cracked on the second syllable. "Garcia, what are you talking about? There’s nothing there. There’s nothing there, son."
"Mum, it’s—" He started to lift his hand again, then forced it back down, but it was already too late.
A sob broke out of her. She pressed the towel to her mouth. "Oh God. He’s not well. He’s not well, I knew it, I knew this was too much for him." She turned to his father with tears already running down her face. "We have to take him somewhere. We have to call someone. A doctor. He needs a doctor."
"He’s alright," his father said, though he did not sound certain of it.
"He’s pointing at the wall and talking about screens!" Her voice climbed toward panic. "That is not alright. First the job, then the apartment, then that girl, and now this. My son is breaking in front of me and you’re telling me he’s alright?"
Garcia stood there and let it hit him, because there was nothing he could say that would not make it worse. He saw himself the way they saw him now. A man who had lost everything, standing in his childhood living room, pointing at nothing, swearing there was a giant screen in the air that only he could see. From where they were standing, there was only one explanation for that, and it was not a system from somewhere impossible. It was a son who had finally cracked under the weight of the last three months.
His mother was crying harder now, the kind of crying that came from real fear rather than drama, and every second he let it continue made it worse.
He had to stop this.
"Mum." Garcia lowered his hand completely and made his voice as level as he could manage. "Mum, stop. Please. It’s not what it looks like."
She kept crying, but she looked at him.
"I was rehearsing," he said. The lie came out fast, before he had fully thought it through, which was the only way he was ever going to get it out. "I was practicing something. Out loud. For an interview."
His father’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Garcia knew at once that the older man did not believe a word of it. But his mother grabbed for the explanation the way a drowning person grabs for a rope, because she wanted it to be true more than she wanted anything else in that moment.
"An interview?" she repeated.
"There’s a firm that might take a call from me," Garcia said, keeping the details vague on purpose. "I was running through how I’d pitch myself. Out loud, with my hands, like I was already in the room with them. I got into it, and I wasn’t thinking about how it looked from outside." He nodded toward the overturned table without looking at it. "I knocked that over when I stood up too fast. That’s all this is."
It was a weak lie and he knew it. There was no screen a man rehearsed a pitch at, and pointing at the air and asking his father whether he could see it had nothing to do with any interview. But his mother was not searching for holes. She was searching for permission to stop being afraid.
"You scared me," she said. "You scared me half to death."
"I know. I’m sorry." He meant that part, at least. "I didn’t mean to. I got carried away."
She wiped her face with the towel and studied him, still not fully calm. "Are you eating? Are you sleeping properly? Because this isn’t like you, Garcia. You don’t do things like this."
"I’m eating," he said. "I’m sleeping. I’m just tired, and I got too far into my own head. That’s all it was."
He could feel that every extra word was making the lie thinner, so he stopped talking and let it sit. His mother kept watching him, searching his face for the truth, and he held still and let her look.
His father said nothing through any of it. He had not bought the story for a second, and Garcia could see that in the steady, unimpressed way the older man was watching him. But his father also saw his wife, who had gone from terrified down to merely frightened, and he made a decision. He put a hand on her shoulder.
"Come on," he said to her, gently. "He’s tired. Let him rest."
"But—"
"Come on."
He steered her toward the hallway. At the doorway he paused and looked back at Garcia, and the look said clearly that this was not finished, that he would have his own conversation later and without his wife in the room. Then he was gone, and her worried voice faded down the hall after him until a door closed with a soft click.
Garcia stayed on his feet until he was sure they were not coming back. Then he dropped into the armchair with a heavy creak of the springs and pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
The room was quiet again. The TV was still murmuring its documentary to itself, the coffee table was still lying on its side where he had left it, and the system window was still hanging in the air exactly where it had been, as though nothing had happened at all.
No one else can see it.
That was the lesson, and it had nearly cost him a trip to a psychiatrist to learn it. The panel was his and his alone. No one else could read the text or hear whatever sound it made, which meant that every time he reacted to it out loud in front of other people, he would look exactly the way he had looked a minute ago, like a man arguing with the air.
He thought about what that meant for him in particular. He was not simply some unemployed man who had stumbled onto a strange new ability. He was the agent who had broken a senior partner’s face in a glass conference room and gotten himself blacklisted across the whole industry. His name was already filed under the word unstable in every database that counted. If it ever got out that he had also started seeing screens that were not there and talking back to them, that label would set like concrete, and Holt would not even need to lift a finger to make it happen, because Garcia would do the rest of the damage to himself.
The system was useful. He had seen enough of it already to be sure of that. But it was only useful if he could keep it hidden, and he had just learned how quickly it could turn on him when he forgot where he was sitting.
He rubbed his face hard, pulled in a slow breath, and made himself focus.
Garcia looked at the mission window again, properly this time, without the panic and without raising his voice.
Register as an independent football agent. Seventy-two hours.
He still did not know how the system actually took instructions. When it first appeared he had spoken to it out loud and pressed the boxes with his finger, but speaking out loud was the exact thing he could no longer afford to do with his parents awake in the house. He needed to know whether it would answer to something quieter.
He lifted one finger toward the panel out of habit, then caught himself and brought it back down, because he remembered too well how that same movement had looked from the doorway. No more pointing. No more reaching into empty air. If either of them walked back in, they had to find a man sitting still in a chair and nothing else.
So he tried it a different way. He kept his hands flat in his lap, fixed his attention on the panel, and formed the words deliberately in his mind, the way he would have typed them into a search bar.
Show me the fastest legal route to register as an independent football agent.
For a moment nothing happened, and Garcia thought that maybe thought alone was not enough to reach it.
Then the panel flickered.
The mission text slid upward and out of the way, the dark background brightened, and new lines began to assemble themselves one after another in clean white letters, the system answering a question he had never said out loud.
