nothing left to see

We woke up to the news that it was all over. All the riots and the energy of last night were gone. Protesters were rounded up, and what once felt like this amazing movement that might actually get something done was now just some people still taking flight. We were asleep on the roof of our building, where just the night before we'd fallen asleep watching the protests, listening to the noise.

Now it was quiet. We could still see some police lights in the distance, hear some sirens, but it was over now. It would all go back to normal. We walked through the city that day, as if we could recapture what was lost--but there was no magic left in the streets. It was dead now, with only a few lingering reminders of what had once been: a broken window here, a fire-scorched wall there.

The worst of it was we believed it. For that night, at least, it felt like there was a future, and it was here, and we were part of it. We really thought the sun would rise on a new world. We were drunk on excitement, drunk on the crowds. We went to sleep feeling victorious.

There's no more victory left in the world, I'm convinced of it now. All things must fail eventually.

how to disappear completely and never be found, reprise

My girlfriend and I were caught in a hailstorm on our way back to the subway. We ran to find shelter--the entryway to some building or other--and just sat there and watched, hands held tight. And the sky flashed a few times and it went on for what seemed like forever and suddenly I felt dizzy and feverish. About the time I noticed the thunder the world started spinning.

I realized she was talking at some point, but the words didn't make any sense. How could they, when the sky was falling all around us? I smiled at her anyway and squeezed her hand, and maybe that was enough for her. We waited in silence until the hail stopped. By then the world had settled down--or at least the world wasn't spinning. The fever was still there, and I felt like I was someone else entirely now. But I smiled, and walked with her to the station.

A train going the wrong way pulled in. She was lost in thought, but I watched it closely, stepping closer, pretending I was just pacing or stretching my legs. Then I heard the chiming sound that meant the doors were closing and dove through at the last second. They closed behind me and I heard my girlfriend give a cry and pound on the doors, but the train was moving now.

I changed cars and dropped my cell phone on the tracks. At the next stop I switched to a different line and went somewhere completely new. And the further I went from familiar ground, the less I felt my fever.

vanishing act

When I was a kid, my parents discovered that I could make things disappear. They didn't know that's what they'd discovered, of course--what they knew was that they couldn't trust me around any of their belongings. They figured I just misplaced things a lot. Sometimes they joked that I was cursed, but they didn't mean it, not really.

I just knew it was weird. As I grew up I thought maybe I really was cursed. But it always happened when I was distracted, so it seemed like I must have just had a problem remembering where I put things. And there's such a thing as unlucky people, right? But when I lost something, it was never found ever again.

I discovered I was actually making the things cease to be in high school, when I had things to hide--and suddenly they were hidden, forever. It wasn't as useful as I'd have liked for contraband, since usually the point of contraband is finding it again later--but at least nobody could catch me with it. I spent hours practicing until I knew all there was to know about it. It was my party trick, the thing I used to impress girls.

I never really found a use for it, though, apart from the novelty, and that wore off pretty soon. I didn't have a talent for theater or magic tricks, though I tried. There wasn't enough variety to the show. Things just disappeared, and never came back. No transformations or startling appearances. But I kept practicing anyway. I kept trying to show it off to people who were less and less interested. I had a gift, and it didn't do anything for me except make people think I was weird.

But I was always learning more. If I tried, I could make big things disappear. Bigger than I thought possible--and the more I tried, the more I realized there was no limit. I went out to the city dump and started vanishing things there--toasters, tires, rusted out husks of cars. I embarked on a campaign of vandalism, destroying things people owned. Nobody else knew my secret, and it left no trace, so there was no way to track it. I left chaos in my wake, but it wasn't enough, no matter how much I destroyed. It would never be enough, though I brought the entire world to nothing.

come hell or high water

Since the floods, I've been out of contact with--well, everyone I know. My home was literally washed away. I watched it float down the street with all the rest of the debris of the city. Cell phones are out of commission, and I'm at a refugee camp, because where else was I going to go? We've got food and water, though it won't last much longer. I don't know anyone here. I haven't tried to get in touch with my family, even though I've had some chances. I haven't even given the camp my name, so they couldn't get in touch if they wanted to.

The thing is, I watched my whole life floating away, or very nearly. And sure, I was upset for a while, but then when I got in the rescue boat and they took me to camp, suddenly I was free. If anything was going to give me a chance to start over, this was it. I could float on the will of strangers, find a new job, rent a modest apartment, live on like it never happened--like my whole life never happened.

If that's not comforting I'm not really sure what is.

rewind

Since my suicide, I've had a lot of time to review the video archives that represent my life. There isn't really much else to do here in the afterlife. Just watch your life. I think it's meant to be a form of judgment, and you have to watch it all. Maybe it's special for suicides. "This is what you gave up," they're trying to tell me. "Look at how happy you were."

That's the part that surprised me. I always thought it would be all the terrible things, all the shit that made me want to off myself, or that just made me feel like a terrible person in general. I haven't seen any of that--and believe me, I've been looking. No, it's all the happy moments. And some of it does make me kind of nostalgic. If they're trying to make me regret my decision, though, it's not working. All that's gone now. If I could go back it would be to more of the stuff they're not showing.

I finally got sick of it and destroyed the little TV they have for watching all these life events last night. I figured they'd fix it or replace it or send me to hell or whatever, but they haven't. It's gone now. My room's just a comfortable couch and some blankets, and a notepad to write on. I'm not sure what comes next.

self-inflicted

How I wish you would take your medicine.

Of course she knew she had problems. So much of the problem was knowing that she had them, knowing she was broken. But they didn't understand that. They thought they were helping when they sent her to the doctors, who told her what was wrong with her using terms that were very technical and professional-sounding. What she took away from it is that it was a problem with her brain. They gave her pills, with names she couldn't pronounce. They told her this will make everything better.

She hasn't thrown them out, though she isn't quite sure why. When she's supposed to be out, she goes back to the doctor for more, and now there's dozens of little pill bottles lined up, hidden under her bed. She kept them on the nightstand for a while until she started having people over to stay the night. They looked at the pills and got this look on their face: this one's crazy. Usually they left, and that made her feel bad. Sometimes they stayed, and that made her feel even worse.

So she hid the pills, and as she did she wondered why she couldn't just throw them away, or why she's never even tried taking them. She's broken. She needs to be fixed. That's how it works, right?

She's supposed to be better, so when people who act very sad and concerned when they talk to her call, she acts better. They seem to believe the trick, and on good days, so does she. She's been seeing someone who seems to believe it, too, who doesn't act sad and concerned around her. That helps sometimes. But sometimes, when she's alone at night, she lies on the floor and stares at her collection of pill bottles. And these days even though she acts better, she's afraid again. Maybe they're just pretending. Soon they'll send her to another doctor and tell her she's been collecting pills under her bed this whole time. And she tells herself she's just being silly, even though she knows that never works.

a bitter pill

I bought a drug that will kill anyone who has recently betrayed someone else. I administered it to my girlfriend tonight, when I cooked dinner for her. According to my dealer, it works best when you serve it mixed in with food, so I just added it to the meal. It turns out it's actually a pretty good seasoning, too--or maybe it was just the sweet taste of victory.

But the problem is she's not dead. She doesn't even look ill. We're watching a movie now, and it's all I can do to focus. I've got a headache that's worse than anything I've ever had, and my vision's blurring and there's this dull ache in my stomach and a sharp pain in my side. It's a comedy--she likes comedies--and every time she laughs, which is often, the headache gets worse and my ears ring for what seems like hours. I can't even understand what she says, or what the people in the movie are saying. It's taking all the energy I have just to write this.

I think I'm dying. I think this must be what dying feels like. I don't know why it's not killing her, or why it's working just on me. I was only ever loyal to her. I did everything right. Maybe she's just better at pretending than I am. That must be it. Even now, at the end, she wants to pretend it's all fine, like she never did anything. At least I can die knowing she'll get what's coming to her in the end.

quite a following

People have been following me for several years now. At first I was frightened--who wouldn't be? But nobody I knew was willing to help. My family sent me to several doctors, who all tried to convince me that these were just paranoid delusions--but I knew better. Eventually I started pretending I didn't notice or care anymore, mostly to keep my family from sending me to another doctor, but also hoping perhaps they'd go away. They didn't. If anything, they doubled their surveillance.

I spent some time trying to lose them, both in the city and out of it. I went on spontaneous vacations, jumped on unplanned buses, even moved to different towns several times, but to no avail. My followers were still there, still watching. The part that vexed me most is they weren't trying to hide, not really. Sometimes they'd nod at me when they caught me looking. But it had been a year or two by this point--what were they waiting for?

Eventually, when I was in another new city and they were still there, I started coming to accept it. Somewhere out there, someone thought I was important enough to dedicate all these resources to watching me. I had no idea who it could be or why they would do this, but it was a comforting thought.

tricks of memory

I've been noticing scars in places I know I haven't been injured lately. Or rather, places I don't remember injuries happening. I don't drink or smoke or do any sort of mind-altering drugs, but I have been under a lot of stress lately. Perhaps I've been blacking out, but that doesn't explain the scars. I'm don't do anything dangerous. I don't even use my kitchen knives more than once or twice a month. I'm utterly boring.

I trace my fingers along the scars and little scenes flash through my mind: me with a razor blade, carefully cutting myself against a colorless backdrop. The only color is the brilliant red of my blood. Could I be forgetting that? In the images I'm--if not happy, more alive than I am in what I've come to think of as my conscious moments. There isn't much color there, either.

I read that the mind remembers things best when it's in the same state as when the event happened. So if you're drunk when you learn something, you'll remember it better when you're drunk. The same goes for sitting at certain desks, being in certain rooms. I worry that I can't remember these moments because I'm not alive like I am then. The mindset is so utterly foreign to me there's just no way my mind can even begin to recollect.

why would you lie?

They invented a pill that makes it impossible to lie. It actually took several years before it really caught on. At first it was a weird novelty with a tiny niche market. Then some of the bigger corporations started pushing it, and soon it was a big trend--people would take it for themselves, buy it for their loved ones, and then, they assumed, they were returning trust to the world.

Then the government got in on the game. There were tax incentives for people who were on the truth pill. It became an invaluable tool in court. That's where it started slipping. Soon it became legal to compel witnesses to take the pill before testifying. Since you could still remain silent, it became legal for police to use it as an interrogation tool.

Eventually the mandate to be on the truth pill was universal. It was seen as an obvious public good, and anyone who stood opposed must have had something to hide. That was the reasoning behind it. Protests were held, but they were stamped out quickly, and opposition, such as it was, went underground.

The remarkable thing was it didn't really work. It stopped you from saying anything that was untrue, but it didn't actually compel people to tell, as the courts would have it, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. People could still fail to mention relevant facts, and, while stating no direct falsehoods, paint a completely misleading picture in the minds of others.

The lawmakers were hoping for a reduction in crime, and an honest, freer society. What they got was chaos. Crimes of passion skyrocketed. Police went reckless in their investigations. This led to widespread rioting. But they still promised us that this was just a step in the right direction. By the time our grandchildren were coming of age, they said, we would live in a society that knew nothing of dishonesty. It would be fair and perfect and free.

But the regime didn't last long enough for their prophecy to come true. En masse, members of Congress and of the government resigned, and the pharmaceutical corporations manufacturing the pill were either destroyed or disbanded. The economy entered an unprecedented freefall, and soon there were protests that had nothing to do with the pills.

It wasn't long before it was all just a memory, and not much longer before it was hardly even that.

moths and flames

Flicker.

I don't remember when the light first started bothering me. I've always been a creature of the dark, but there was a time when I could tolerate the light, too. Lately, though, I can't stand it. It's not that it hurts me physically, or that I'm unused to its brightness. But the presence of those lights starts burning away at my psyche. I can't help but stare at it. I can think of nothing else while the lights are on--not without great effort, at least.

So I skulk. There isn't much else I can do. I avoid rooms with lights on and I come out only at night, forcing myself into the grocery stores and barely managing to buy the things I need without going mad. And I slink home and fumble around in the dark, too afraid to turn on a light even to see the things I need.

My neighbors think I've gone mad. They're complaining to the landlord--ostensibly about the blackout curtains, but it's really because they don't like that I shun the light. And they're probably right. I just don't know where else to go, or what to do. Even the thought of it is overpowering. All I want is some rest.

everything that is yours

First dig two graves.

I promised that she would be sorry, and I'm a man who keeps his promises. But I had no interest in making her sweat every day until I finally brought her to ruin, when I could just as easily strike without warning. I had no interest in lording it over her at all--it was better that she suffer and know nothing of the reasons for it.

No doubt she never gave me a thought for those years in the interim, as she established herself in the world. She didn't know that I was watching. She didn't know that every time something good happened to her, I had put into place a way to take it away from her. And she didn't know, when the world started slipping from her fingers, why it was happening.

I started with little things. Things that, if they happened on their own, would be just a minor annoyance, but when they happen in succession, made her suspect that the world was out to get her--and she was almost right, of course. The subsequent paranoia and bad moods only amplified what happened next, as I stole her job from under her, made her friends hate her and her family abandon her, even forced her lover to move across the country, away from her.

But she was clever, and she had fallback plans--but they were gone when she went to fall back on them. And when she finally hit rock bottom she still had no idea that it was my hand the whole time guiding these events. It is a comfort to know that you suffer for someone's revenge--but to think that everything has gone wrong utterly without sense or reason is to know despair.

somewhere else

It's none of your concern anymore.

He kept things together, more or less, when he was still around. People came to him with their problems, because he cared, because he could make things work, because they knew they could count on him to do the right thing. He was respected. When he got a job--a new job, a wonderful job--somewhere else, he was given a fond farewell, and we all promised to keep in touch. For a while, some of us even did.

But he was gone, and people changed. We had to. What we all thought would be a hole that we could never fill turned out to just be a temporary gap. It wasn't even that we learned to do without, like there was still something missing. It was more that we started living like he was never there, or at least never necessary. Life moved on.

But life has its way of bringing people together. Some years later he came back--as people often do--and, seeing a friend of mine in trouble, did what men like him always do in those situations: he tried to help. She shrugged him off, said she'd deal with it, but thanked him for his concern.

Then he did something I'd never seen him do, which was turn to someone else--in this case, me. "What happened? What did I do wrong?"

I said that I didn't know, but we exchanged a look that said everything. This isn't the town he left.

to please you

Sometime down the road, she stopped appreciating me. I had given up everything for her--my career, my time, my love. Everything I could, I gave to her. I helped her out--not just the little things, either. I got her that dream job she always wanted. I brought her the things she needed. First it was cigarettes, except when she quit for a while. Then booze, in little hidden bottles and flasks so they wouldn't catch on. Just to get through the day. I made her what she was, gave up everything so she could do everything she ever dreamed of.

I even carried on when it was clear she thought of me as nothing but a way to get her fix when she wasn't supposed to or couldn't tear herself away. Because she was more important. Of course she was. And yet--how could she stand it? Knowing that I'd done so much for her?

She wasn't home enough to notice when I started bleeding into her drinks, and she never noticed the taste. If it tasted coppery it was probably just the flask. She never suspected that she was drinking my blood along with her liquor. She was letting me become a part of her. And what if I was growing weaker by the day? She was finally becoming mine, letting me influence her.

Then one night she came home and I had passed out from blood loss, and she called the ambulance. "See?" I said, as they loaded me onto the stretcher. "She does care." And I smiled as they drove me away and the world went black.

warfare

When the war finally came, we'd spent so much time living in the fear of it that it almost didn't matter. We all had our shelters and our stockpiles. We all knew what we'd do when there was a raid--we'd done so many drills, when the first real attack came half of us didn't even know it. Those that did, didn't care. We knew what to do. It wasn't until we felt the ground shake, deep in our shelter, that it really hit home: this is for real. So we hid for longer than our drills mandated, and when the all clear sounded we went back to our homes, some of which now consisted mostly of rubble and debris.

When I was young, I was always frightened of war. All the violence and destruction and displaced lives--it seemed like the most unimaginable horror, the worst thing that humans had ever invented. I pictured myself huddled in a shelter with my fellow survivors, afraid for my life, trembling, alive, indignant. It was a terrible thing, and we all knew it was terrible, and wished that we had some power over it, to make it all go away.

I never expected to be bored by it. I never expected to hear reports of casualties and damages on a hand-powered radio and just think, "Well, they should have learned the drills better." I never expected to find my stockpiles of canned food and survival supplies as a mildly irritating necessity.

People kept dying throughout the war, but it was never anyone I knew well enough to care. You lose track of neighbors all the time in the real world, don't you? It just happens a little more. Of course, we all knew what really happened to them, but we'd all been through the drills, and functionally speaking nothing really changed, so what good was it to think about it?

five-day forcast

The weather gets worse when I try to visit. I didn't think anything of it at first, because it's still winter and of course the pass is bad sometimes, so instead I just sent her my apologies and promised the next weekend. But just as I'd pack up the winds would pick up and I'd lose power and the radio would be reporting the passes closed again.

This happened a few times before I caught on. I'd start checking the weather in advance, and it would be reporting clear and dry. The weather only got bad when I started planning a trip. So I tried to catch it off guard, leave without any planning or preparation, only to find myself stuck on the freeway for hours, stranded in a little truck stop town with nowhere to be and nothing to do.

So I stopped making promises, and she started asking why I couldn't tell her when I'd be by to visit. I didn't know what to say. She wouldn't believe the weather was cursed, she wanted me to keep trying, and so I did, and so I kept getting stranded, and I came to know the little nowhere towns and the little greasy spoons I'd find myself eating at, wishing I were somewhere else.

I wanted nothing more than to give up, but she wouldn't understand, so I guess I'll just have to settle for failure.

mirror images

I read studies that found that couples tend to grow to look alike as they get older. I don't know if that's true, or what that means, but it didn't say anything about starting to look like your ex girlfriends.

I haven't seen her in years. We were together for a year or two, I think, and then there was an ugly falling out and later the sort of awkward reconciliation you get when there was once an ugly falling out. But I know that when I look into the mirror in the past few weeks, I'm starting to see her staring back at me.

It's not just the mirror, either. Photographs of me turn up on the internet and I'm making her expressions. I'd swear my eyes have even turned that weird shade of blue hers are. But it's in the mirror that I spend what must be hours every day practicing expressions, trying to find one that isn't one of hers. Sometimes I manage to coax my smile away from her smile, but it feels unnatural, and all those hours of practice are gone after a few hours.

I'm not unhappy. I'm dating someone else now and she's wonderful. Sure, I think of her sometimes, but I think of a lot of things sometimes. I don't know why this is happening, and I don't know who I can talk to about it. I just want it to stop.

But that worries me too, because I'm frightened, and I'm not sure what I'm afraid of. I think I'm afraid that I'm turning into her, and the thing is there's a reason we don't keep in touch.

blue skies

A few days ago, the sky stopped being blue. Not because of cloud cover or anything, but because blueness simply stopped being a quality the sky possessed.

Everyone noticed, of course. For the first few hours, the whole city stopped, and people were just staring at the sky. I'd say they were wondering what it meant, but that's not what people actually do. They stop and stare. They take pictures. They ask what's going on, and did you see that, and then, some hours later, they go on with their lives.

But me, I couldn't get over it. For the first day or two I could still get people to talk about it, because it was still interesting, but by three days in, some people seemed to have forgotten, and the rest didn't care. Yes, the sky isn't blue anymore, but what can we do about it? There's still work to be done, and it won't get done any faster if we keep talking about it.

And maybe they're right. The world keeps turning. Nothing else has changed. But it seems to me like everything has, in its own little way.

impermanence

Give us a smile, January.

She was young and stupid, like young people ought to be. She met him at a New Year's party and they both drank too much, like young people ought to, and at midnight she kissed him. Of course she told her friends that it's just what you do at the new year, but in truth she never had before and this year, she told herself, it would be different.

That January started out beautifully, like Januaries often do, and it snowed all the time and the ground was always sparkling like someone had scattered it with crushed diamond. This is how winters go, of course, and what started out as magical and beautiful soon simply became a crushing and monotonous cold, and even as February approached the spring seemed years away.

But it came, and with the flowers she'd mostly forgotten her brief glittering winter fling, and with the years there were other boys and other girls and much, much later she told everyone that she only remembered the good times. It's like the winter in that way: you can always remember how beautiful the snow is, but never how painful the cold is, how depressing the dark is.

And years went by and one year she found herself sitting with an old friend long after the party ended, and talking about youth and folly, and wondering if talking about having once been young and stupid meant that she was no longer young nor stupid--if she no longer drank too much because it was fun and instead drank too much because it made living more bearable for a while, did that mean she was wiser as well as older, or was it just a different kind of folly?

It had been another January full of hopes that ended up lost in the dark and the cold, and this time, she said, she was certain the winter would never end. Maybe she'd hoped for a little bit of springtime out of the conversation. But as she said it, something changed. She found in herself the resolve to face the winter alone, without the aid of all the false hopes and disappointments she'd come to rely upon.

It was a long, cold, dark walk home, but between the alcohol and her newfound resolve, she didn't mind so much.

broken

It was an evening much like this one, late in the winter, when the days were just starting to get longer again, and the air was cool but not cold and you could just find yourself thinking, "Spring can't be that far off now." When the skeletons of the trees, though nothing was different, started to suggest the brilliant green that would herald the spring. That's when I first saw a man broken.

We were waiting for a bus after a show. It was going to be a long wait, and we were talking, laughing, doing whatever--it should have been a good night. It felt like a good night. It felt like a night where things finally start to go right. Then his phone rang, he wandered of to answer it. As he stepped out of earshot the last thing I heard him say was something like "What's happened?"

When he came back his face had changed. His smile was gone. He saw me but he didn't see me. And I asked him what was wrong, and he told me, and I told him that it would be all right, because that's what you're supposed to say. But we both knew that was a lie. He called a cab, and was gracious enough to pretend I wasn't doing him a favor by not coming with him.

I took the bus back home alone. When next I saw him he was a grimmer man. He still laughed and smiled, but they were the laugh and smile of a broken man.