A note found on the roof of an apartment building
Stories bore me, but I didn’t say that, instead I said: “They never run out of ammo in movies.”
When she looked away to exhale from her cigarette I glanced down at my phone to confirm the following fact:
“Even though, did you know, an AK47 can fire at a rate of 700 rounds per minute.”
She would not look back so I just read off my lap:
“Explosions, like in movies, would tear your body apart because it’s like 15 millions pounds PER INCH.”
I fucked it all up again, went imperial instead of metric. I bet she thought how weird that was, since I’m not American, since my profile said British, but no, she was thinking: “You are boring me, I should have stayed home and watched the new episode of OBLACK.”
So I said OBLACK and she gasped ,
So I asked OBLACK?
And her eyes strained away from her face like I’d named some urban deity and I asked if she’d ever heard of OBLACK and she replied between breaths that Orange is the new black is a show and that was the last time I saw her and first time I suspected I was psychic.
You see I didn’t tell anyone about my delusions because it was fun to be psychic, more fun than real life or boring stories. Even video games all started to play the same. Hellforged was the last one I looked forward to coming out, my digital salvation- I paid for a taxi just to get to the store ten minutes quicker but of course there was traffic.
During a red light I felt eyes on me. Saw by my side Nikki Hodgeson, through the window on a bus looking down on me, Nikki Hodgeson but only if she’d aged, her cheeks had lines, her hair has been reduced to a comfortable bun- if I had married her or at least kissed her she’d look like this in twenty years, her old eyes slapped me back to the windshield and I moved on.
On the escalators up to the mall, a chinese lady, shrunken the way asians get after menopause glanced at me as she passed, decending. She had Leela’s face, but with mellower eyes, aged; bored. Maybe we all share the same genes, maybe we’re all connected even if it doesn’t feel that way.
The shopkeeper thought I was rude because I took too long paying with coins. He also thought something about the number fifty three, fifty three- if I asked him back then I could have proved I wasn’t crazy, if I’d had the balls to say: What number are you thinking of? But I was scared he would ignore or hate me.
Instead, at home where it used to be peaceful, past the cellophane wrap, inside the package, underneath the game there was a second disk. Gold rimmed with assymettrical red veins along the top like it was infected. I googled it, checked the first few pages, found nothing so I knew it was special.
I didn’t install the game then.
It got worse with every commute. I saw Sam on the subway if he’d put on 20kg, Marco was the bus driver on Thursday- a scar on his forehead he’d never had, the color gone from his hair, his twin grandfather who wouldn’t even look at me when I muttered thank you.
Maybe you think I had so few friends since highschool that I was fixated on them. Seeing patterns that weren’t there. Like in a story, with the same boring patterns, like in every repetitive day. I tracked my thoughts like that, over the course of months; heard so few depraved sexual fantasies from any women I glanced at- madness is so disappointing.
I continued to date via the app, or at least tried. Kept swiping left in the hopes of seeing someone else from my past. But they only popped up when I was going somewhere else. I finally got so bored that I inserted the red veined disk. My monitor blue screened, then went green. Red symbols formed, streamed from right to left, they danced like tiny sprites I couldn’t make out till I thrust my head so close I could see three eyes, blue, red, and green.
Those colors set me free.
From all the tiny human fears- a gift left behind, or in front, there is no word in English for that direction, it can only be expressed with mathematics I now understand, but lack the jargon to expain. See I still can’t speed read wikipedia, even after they found my body, pulsating with red light, pooling around it- an elementary particule that I helped them discover.
I couldn’t solve war without killing, or watching too closely. If I gave the poor too much money it broke the economy. Hunger was still an issue so in the end, I just showed you all how to have nearly infinite energy, hoping it would lead to space travel, and maybe to me, then I peeked- a century in the futue and still you hadn’t broken the lightspeed barrier, still groped each other on this tiny world.
So I guess we never made the disk ourselves. And the difference between an alien and your God and Me is just theoretical. So I told them, I called everyone up, showed them how much I had become. I am a God and anyone who knew me was now special by proximity. So I gave them a gift.
To slip back into time and watch my whole life, stare at it like a screen. They had to be quiet, only allowed to walk past and notice how I had no idea back then how special I was, and am, till I got bored again. So I spent most of the rest of my time making the past versions of myself happy. I baked strange, positive encounters, whilst I, who am beyond time as you can see, supped on my newfound memories.
I ate myself up.
Till I made the mistake or pushing my past self away from the disk and onto the pavement. I fell from a great height and now all that is left is this story, and I never was.
1kormore 