I Will Rise (32 page)

And boy does it grow. In a matter of seconds the entire room is three feet deep in gushy, slimy, frenetic worm-vine. Eddie, Annabelle, the bits and pieces of Allen and his two goons have all been dissolved within the greasy, slithering mire. My head rolls about the heap, the skin sluicing away, the muscle, bone and brain beneath losing form within the toxic, lethal mess.

Vision begins to pop and sputter like an old television with a bad set of tubes. And then there is pain so massive it is impossible to register. Louder than love, there is a long, drawn-out fizzle, followed by a silencing sizzle, and then everything just snaps out.

* * *

This is it.

This is the pathetic end to a rather pathetic life.

Disappointment rages. So many regrets. Fuck it. Bring on the eternal darkness. Snuff out consciousness. I’m ready. Any minute now. Or so I think. Or so I hope.

Instead, I am floating free, no body, no eyes, just crisp, detached vision, much like the killing spree back in Vegas, rising above the city streets, watching murderous infection spread like electric light throughout the tightknit crowds. As it did then, it feels pretty fucking wonderful. Unlike then, my body has been consumed and I am sick with wonder: where do I go from here?

Up and up and up with no hope of ever coming down? Into the sun? To God? Across the universe and back, an endless loop: me, forever floating, forever bearing witness to the evolutions of a dead planet?

I float briskly, rising fast like sighted gas, like visualization light. The tendrils keep pace and continue to fill the room. I pass through the ornately sculpted ceiling and drift through internal wiring and insulation until I breach the crown of the building and glide past the Hollywood Roosevelt’s glowing rooftop sign. Below me, the tendrils crumble the top floor of the hotel and spill out from all sides. They pour down, dense, wriggly rain, and begin to sweep over the crowded city streets.

Higher and higher.

Will I ever get another chance? I could have been king of the dead. I could have been exploding salvation for the living. I could have been something, but instead here I am: empty, lighter than air, nothing. I suppose we can blame my conditioning, my hand, my life, but I’ve been doing that for so long even I don’t believe it anymore. I am in control. Don’t listen to my bitching and moaning. I’m driving. I didn’t explode because I am selfish and worthless. I didn’t explode because I didn’t let myself explode. Will I ever get another chance? Idiot. I just blew my chance.

Annabelle and Eddie and scores of people like them, people filled with love and compassion and hate and idioms and things to cringe over and things to swoon over have been forever popping in and out of my life. I’ve been too stupid to notice. I’ve been too elitist and fucked up and closed off and self-absorbed to appreciate anyone or anything. And ordinarily that wouldn’t matter, but the end, or whatever this is, drops things into perspective. I’ve spent my entire life thinking about pointlessness and searching for meaning in a God or anarchistic schemes or my own inadequacies, never once thinking that it’s not about me or my place or my beliefs. I think I have realized (and I say “I think” because I might be wrong) that our lives are more about the other people in them.

It’s a shame because it’s over now and for the first time I think I am ready to live, to take all I have learned and apply it. Merlyn’s lessons have been dispensed and I am hungry to give it a shot, to do it right. Not that it could be done right. I have come to this understanding that life is about the people around you, but I don’t think that most of the people around me understand this. Things like ego fuck everything up. If given another chance, I don’t know if it would matter. I don’t think there is anything I could do to promote harmony and goodwill. If I am ugly and strange on the outside, but beautiful on the inside, I will still be treated as if I am ugly and strange.

Vanity: the impossible hurdle. We are all taught to crave significance. It just complicates life and breeds disappointment. People have to learn to dream small. As long as we all secretly (some of us overtly) want to be stars, want to be noticed, want to be gods on earth with ichor flowing through our mortal veins, we will all regard one another with contempt and strive for personal successes. Competition is ugly. It’s so much better just to blend in and live. Learn your lessons, learn to love, embrace normality and enjoy breathing.

Trust me on this one.

My seizures have always set me apart and I have hated every minute of it. True, I speak of negative attention and embarrassment, but regardless, I have stood out and I hated standing out. I think most people do.

I think deep down those in power, those who have attained significance among the insignificant, secretly desire to be ordinary again. It’s a sad situation because if a person in power is restored to insignificant stature, that hungry ache for worth will surely resurface. Human beings are such schizophrenic messes.

Hollywood grows smaller and smaller as I go higher and higher. The tendrils are legion, ever growing, dissolving Hollywood into a brownish red puddle of goo. They spread like wildfire overtaking city block after city block. By the time I am high enough in the sky to see the state of California as a series of colored shapes the tendrils have taken dominion. As I go higher and higher the United States, looking more like a 2-D map than a three-dimensional land mass, is being quickly devoured. The tendrils amass and conquer and overwhelm state after state with gooey ease. When they run out of land, consuming Canada and Mexico, they fill the oceans.

Higher and higher.

They engulf South America and Europe and Asia and Africa and Australia and Antarctica.

Higher and higher.

From space the earth is no longer blue and majestic. Instead, it is nothing more than a wriggling mass of browns and reds and wiggly yellows. Once, when I was a kid—five, six, seven maybe—my dad took me fishing. He bought a Styrofoam cup of bait from the fishing marina. Inside the cup were hundreds upon hundreds of disgusting worms. The sight of those worms— intertwined, pulsing, slithering—got my hand buzzing. I seized for a good twenty minutes. When it was all over, I had capsized our little fishing boat and caused my dad all kinds of panic, frustration and embarrassment. He chastised me for my incompetence and told me I almost drowned. He said if he had to do it all over again, he would have let me drown. That was the last time my dad ever took me anywhere on my own.

Higher and higher.

And I feel as if I am drowning, as if I have been doing so my entire life. Thoughts like water, rushing, devastating, polluting, rendering comprehension impossible.

I wonder: had I been able to explode, would I still be here? Did Allen hacking me up produce the same results? The dead have been stopped and the earth in essence saved. That was the plan after all, but if I had exploded on my own, would I have wiped out only the dead, thereby saving the earth from the tendrils? Most important, would I have been rewarded with death or life or something other than nothingness?

I wonder: had Allen not killed me, would I have been made king? Would I have been happy as ruler of the dead? Would I have been the only thinking creature on the planet?

I guess it doesn’t matter. I guess all that matters now is me and my thoughts and the infinite dark. There is a hope inside that I will touch down somewhere and be given another chance. When I think about it, I get nervous because I still don’t know if I am capable of love for love’s sake. I don’t know if I can interact with others without expecting to benefit in some way. And if I have learned my lessons and am given the opportunity to put them to work, is there a place in the universe that could abide? Is there a place unaffected by self-worth?

My old friend Merlyn says: “Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough.” I am inclined to think he is right. I am inclined to think this is the root of all our problems. In hoping for ideals, if I could find a place, land in a place, wake up in a place where the mind’s power is enough, where we are all secure and comfortable in our own skins, I think I would want to live forever.