The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
What's Left?
9-15-2007

It's nighttime. I'm outside my home, but it's a home I never had. The remains of a wooden swing hang from a shadowy tree in the yard. A tall wooden fence blocks my view. My dad is at a workbench in the darkness of the garage, messing with my computer, because he thinks he found viruses on it. If he did, it wasn't from me, and regardless, he shouldn't be touching my stuff.

My mom has been inside for a while, making a mess in the family room. Building me a new wife, since my other one left me earlier in the day. Was my previous wife a robot, too? I don't remember, anymore. After a while you can't tell the difference.

I step inside my home. The lights are out. I call out, and the robot responds. I can barely make out her figure sitting in my dad's old chair among the boxes and packing she came with. She sits a little to the side, her legs together and her hands clasped in her lap. Her head hanging down a bit.

"I'm not very good at talking yet," she says, "but I've been practicing the word 'Thursday' all day." Her speech is awkward, but still endearing, almost like a foreign accent. I kneel down by her and put my hand on her leg to feel how real it is. It's very real.

I think back to all those dreams I had where my parents did stupid things, and when I'd yell at them at the top of my lungs. Things like, "Get the fuck outta here!" Did those things really happen? I don't think so. They must've been dreams. Did I really have those dreams, or did I just think I did?

There isn't much familiar about this place.

Time passes and daylight comes. I pull into a parking lot. I see Jackie Chan, an old black guy from the gym, and my lunch friend Tim getting together under a tree. I'd forgotten that this was the place they met on this day every year, to fight. It was a way of commemorating their friendship, for as many long-standing friendships do, it started with a fight. I was fortunate to catch it last year, and it was quite something.

I get out my camera and turn on the video, but night falls instantly and I can't get a good picture. I run toward the site, but they disperse. I continue and find many college kids camping out at a good vantage point on the grass. I'm in a dorm courtyard. One group carries a piece of furniture from one building to the next as a practical joke. I take a seat on a comfortable patch of ground, but then wonder if it's an anthill and stand back up.

The Rock comes over and hands out hard, blue candy from a plastic bag. He also gives everyone a roll of tape and gets everyone's attention. He starts to peel the tape from the roll and says, "This roll of tape is you. It has many layers. On the surface is your personality, wrapped around your core." He and everyone else, including me, unravels his tape as he speaks. "Keep unraveling, and you find your hopes and dreams..." and so on, until everyone is left with an unraveled piece of tape. "What's left?" he asks.

"Nothing!" I shout, because there is no single part of a person that makes a person who they are. But he ignores me and talks about disabled children, bringing himself to tears before running off across a bridge. It's then that I realize he is disabled, his arms and legs in braces. Explains why I haven't seen him around lately.

I tell someone a story about how I broke out of prison in Antarctica, then took a small boat to France and fought ghouls. I don't remember the point of it, but I figured I'd pull their leg for a while. The previous night, I dreamt about breaking out of prison, so it was still on my mind.

posted by Phlegm at 9/15/2007  (0) comments

 
My Own Creation
7-14-2007

I find out I can go back to graduate school part-time for free. This sounds like a good idea, because I can work and just take one or two classes at a time. Only the brightest and best go to this school, which is out in a green and mountainous countryside.

I ride my skateboard to the school from where I live, because I live on top of a mountain and I have good momentum. I effortlessly and quickly glide down grassy slopes and trodden dith paths created by students and campus police. At the top of a slope, however, I lose the skateboard, which tumbles down into a security car and explodes. I'd forgotten about the forbidden explosive device attached to it. Rather than get into trouble, I walk as if I'm not the guilty one. The remains of the car transform into a jet-powered, sea-faring vessel, which takes off into the air to patrol the area. It takes my skateboard, too, which is undamaged.

I join a group of people headed to the school. We're all new. The school is hard to get to, so an old man and an old woman are showing us the way. They are two of the oldest faculty of the school, the Illuminated Ones, whose scientific knowledge is so great that it is indistinguishable from magic. They lead us through mountain passes and valleys of flowers. Walking. It's far, but somehow fast, and not tiring.

We come to a rock face, a dead end. I start to walk toward it, to touch it, because I know there must be an entrance here. The old man yells at me, "Stop! That's the easy way! It is perilous! Never take it!" He waves his staff and another portion of the wall vanishes, next to where I was standing. We enter.

Inside is like a mine shaft. There's no light, so we all carry lanterns. The illusion of antiquity is broken by big steel security doors and other modern pieces of equipment lying about, as if carelessly left in a dorm hallway. It's about this time I start to think this is a stupid movie, because I can't see anything, and we're just spending all our time getting to the action. And why is this school so hard to get to, anyway? What's the point of going to it if you risk death just by getting to class? And I'm part-time!

I flash my lantern down a side corridor and see my skateboard, which means the rent-a-cops must be near. I go to retrieve it at the behest of one of the other new students. When I return, everybody is gone, except for a crazy old guy who was stalking us. I see into his mind, and immediately know the secret of passing through this place, but I also get a blurry image that he once killed one of the Illuminated Ones. I leave him and rejoin the others, but our guides are gone.

A disembodied voice says we must find the rest of the way ourselves, but we're in a room with no doors. Suddenly, a door opens and shuts again, vanishes. There's another one, so I run into it and hold the door open. As I'm doing so, another elevator opens up in another wall, so I shout for someone else to grab that one. Three more open up. I tell everyone that each person needs to grab one, and then at the same time, we'll invoke the same command. I look behind myself and see that there's another elevator behind me, inside my own, and another within that one. The remaining two people--one of whom is a hammerhead shark flying through the air--occupy those.

On the count of three, I release my door. As it shuts, my room sways back like a pendulum. I say the command, but nobody else does. My room swings back and forth, and finally everybody else says it, but they're too late. I'm pissed at their incompetence. We're trapped. A voice tells me that the only way now is to invoke Jesus Christ. The notion is preposterous and I refuse.

Next thing I know, I'm in a limousine with several other people. We're all dead, being chaperoned to a house for dead people. I'm pissed. AA is sitting in front of me. She seems to know more than I do. I ask if we'll continue to age, and she says no. I ask if we'll be able to learn new things, and she says no. This sucks! At least I'll always look good, though.

The place is like a big ski lodge. I look for faces I know, and I see CL from AXE packing up some stuff. She says she's heading out because she goes to school part-time. I ask what the point is, how she can learn anything if she's dead, and she just smiles and shrugs. Something isn't right.

I go downstairs into a labyrinthine basement that's full of bedrooms, reminiscient of both my old church and the AXE house. At the end of one corridor, I find a hidden bedroom, and inside is an open window. With much difficulty, I squeeze through it to the outside, and fly away.

I fly over fields and mountains, back to where I started, and find the crazy guy. He's reading a book. "This is the only thing that keeps me sane," he says. "This book, written by the first Illuminated One, now dead. The others..." He dismissively waves his hand at first one mountain and then another, as if those were their creations, "...they are nothing. But this..." His hands contort into an impossible configuration, but I understand he means to suggest that this first Illuminated One understood time and space like nobody else before or after, and that nobody understands his creations.

I find the entrance to the school, and open the door to the so-called easy and perilous path. I instantly end up in a study. I'm also a child again. I sit down with pen and paper and start to draw something shaped like a crown. A female Illuminated One--the guide from before, but much younger--is astonished to see me. "Is that you?" she asks, then looks my drawing with horror and asks, "Why are you drawing that?!?" I put my head on the table and cry, "What else am I supposed to draw? That's how things are!" She consoles me and says, "A lot has changed since you left." I look around and point at objects. I say, "These things, they're all the same! I don't get it! They're all the same!" I cry uncontrollably, because I'm dead and unable to learn more about anything. The woman tells me, "Crying is not what you're to do." I stop crying, and think about how unfair it is--that I'm forever unable to understand my own creation.

posted by Phlegm at 7/14/2007  (0) comments

 
Conflict is born
5-9-2007

Everything is the same. Every person, place, and thing is contained in a single, dimensionless point floating in the void. There is no conflict; only serenity.

Something changes, and suddenly there is space, time, people, places, and things--separate entities fractured from the whole. Nobody remembers when they were one and the same and everything was good. I want to roll everything back together and make it whole again, but each fragment now has its own identity that wants to persist for its own sake.

Conflict is born.

posted by Phlegm at 5/09/2007  (0) comments