9:09 pm. Sunday, September 19th, 2021
I
Dear Reader,
Growing up, my dad always told me that there were three times in life that you should be there for someone: when someone is born, when someone gets married, and when someone dies. Something about each of these three things has always managed to unsettle me in ways I’ve never really understood. I had been invited to a cousin’s wedding last May and chose to make the journey down to their reception just outside of Chesapeake Bay. I had met this cousin’s boyfriend several Thanksgivings ago and felt an obligation to see them wed. The pandemic made me feel disconnected from family, but this was a cousin I was never very close to. I always felt like we were grasping at some deeper relationship as children, but the long-distance between us always prevented us from being friends.
The day before the wedding, I packed enough clothes for a few days and rented a nice but not too nice BMW for the seven hour drive down. The traffic was terrible once I got to Virginia with I-95 being nearly bumper-to-bumper as I slowly trudged past Quantico Station. While stuck in this traffic, somewhere in between half-listening to some podcast about Elizabeth Holmes and picking at the dead skin in my fingernails, I saw a dilapidated wheelchair in the woods next to the road. It hadn’t been crushed or demolished by a car, but rather rusted and bent, like it had been overworked to a point of exhaustion. The worn and ripped black seat cushion sticks out in my memory. It was a strange and sudden break from the monotony of driving, but before I knew it, it was fading into the distance of my rear-view mirror. Even now, after everything that has happened, I still think about how this wheelchair got there, and who had once used it.
This was my first vacation off from work since I had started my new job. I had been doing PR at a fairly successful firm on the Upper-East side for a little over a year. I only had a couple of clients, mostly mid-sized start-ups that had settled in the northeast, but I always made sure to show that I wanted to do more. I would bring coffee to meetings; fill out spreadsheets in between seeing clients; research our competitors. Truthfully, I had been doing half of the busy work that our interns were supposed to be doing – but I didn’t mind. Someday somewhere, I was convinced, someone would notice.
Around 11am, I arrived at the hotel.
“Is that you?” a distant voice from across the lobby asked me excitedly.
“Denise!” I said, recognizing my soon-to-be-wed cousin.
Denise and her fiance, John-Paul, were standing by the bar of the hotel with some friends of theirs I didn’t recognize. Denise had on a silk pantsuit and six-inch Jimmy Choo heels. John-Paul smelled like Drakkar Noir from 12-feet away.
“I thought it was you!” She said as we embraced. “I haven’t seen you since you were in high school!”
“Right? I probably still had my braces on.” I quipped. “It’s really been a minute, hasn’t it?”
“Oh my God, are we about to have our first legal drink together? Come sit down for a bit.”
I really didn’t want to, I had just driven 7 hours that came out being closer to 8. The only thing I wanted to do was rest, but if the purpose of the trip was to reconnect with Denise and John-Paul, then I guess I had to.
“Yeah, sure!” I responded with feigned enthusiasm. “Let me just get a Miller Lite, please.”
I wasn’t super intent on drinking a giant cocktail after driving seven hours. I hadn’t drank beer since college and it was the last thing I remember drinking.
“One Michelob.” said John-Paul gesturing with an upraised finger towards the bartender. “Man, Michelob Ultra – ‘the champagne of beers’. I turn around and all of a sudden you’re grown up and drinking this fancy stuff.” He was drinking a mint julep.
“It’s just what I like.” I said with a shrug. “I promise I’m not that fancy.”
Nearly everything he said in that sentence was wrong, but I decided to just not correct him.
“Sharon was just telling us about the deal she had closed last week.” Denise interjected.
“Really? Congratulations.” I said, turning to who I had to assume was Sharon. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”
Sharon shot me a brief look of selfish indignation before repainting her veneer of cordiality. She also had a pantsuit and was wearing the exact same pair of heels as Denise.
“No problem! It really wasn’t much.” she quipped cheerily then carried on. “Just that after I took my brother’s girlfriend, Paula out to Slice – that new nightclub in Ocean City – I finally convinced her to become a part of the MutiVida family!”
“Sharon here is gonna become the next Jeff Bezos!” John-Paul shot back, grinning ear-to-ear. “Her credit is gonna get a huge boost for that.”
“Well here’s to you!” I responded, raising my beer and still feeling somewhat guilty for interrupting her story with my entrance.
“So what does Paula do?” I probed, “Are you in M&A for . . .”
“MultiVida!” Sharon, Denise, and John-Paul reminded me in near unison.
“Right, MultiVida.”
“What’s M&A?” Sharon added.
“Oh, Mergers and Acquisitions,” I replied, sheepishly.
Sharon still looked exceedingly confused.
“Like, the branch of a company that is in charge of buying and selling other companies within it,” I affirmed.
“Yeah, I guess you could say I do some of that. I kinda do a little bit of everything.” Sharon responded. “I’m like an owner, manager, salesperson, basically mergers and acquisitions all rolled into one.”
“Oh, you’re the owner?” I asked, suprised.
“Sharon’s a girlboss!” someone in the back added. The group started laughing uproariously and I laughed along politely. I didn’t really know what to make of that word. It was the first time I had ever heard it.
Upon closer inspection, her and every other woman in the group were wearing the same pairs of heels. With this discovery, I remember feeling a certain tension in the air, like everyone here wanted something from me.
“That’s fantastic… ” I said, this time with more confusion than feigned enthusiasm. “Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, all you guys are wearing the same shoes – what’s up with that?”
“Oh!” Denise added, “We get these from Charnelle once our credit hits 5000 points. You would love Charnelle; she’d be, like, totally into you. She’d think you’re such a good fit.”
“Oh my God, no,” I said. “I haven’t dated anyone since high school.”
“Not to date, silly!” my cousin responded, “You wish you could ever date someone as free and as powerful as Charnelle. I mean for the company!”
“Oh, I actually have a job right now.” I was taken aback.
“Ahhh, So you’re in the game too?” John-Paul asked.
I assumed he was just asking if I had a job.
“Yeah,” I responded, “I work at a PR firm in the city.”
“It must suck.” he said.
There was a brief pause in the conversation. The hotel bar was empty besides this group, save for a couple of young women drinking quietly and alone. I had no conceivable response to this. I had never had this asserted to me before. I think I just made a noise along the lines of “Huh?”
“It must suck.” he said. “The lack of freedom. The long, tireless hours. The insufferable people, constantly controlling you; bending you in every possible direction to appease their whims. Don’t lie to me and tell me it doesn’t suck.”
I paused again in an effort to make my response more deliberate, but I couldn’t find anything.
“It could be a whole lot worse,” I replied generously.
This was the last time I tried to speak to John-Paul.
I spend a lot of my time wondering if I’ve spent my life valuing the right things. I’m only 22 at the time of writing this and yet I still sometimes feel like I haven’t done enough for myself. The so-called “real world” seems like something far off and intangible; like I haven’t really seen any of it yet. As far as I’m concerned, I really only started thinking about myself and my future just before I had graduated college. Up until then, I was just rolling with the changes: high school to a four-year degree to some internship then managing to find myself working a steady job. I was never really thriving but keeping my head above the water as well as I could. Even then I wasn’t totally sure what I was supposed to be doing. How could I possibly find “the right path” that every condescending high school guidance counselor had lectured me on before? I’ve been out of high school for six years now and I’m still not entirely sure what any of that, meant.
In spite of everything else, the reception was a lot of fun. I inhaled mouthfuls of a fondant-dense wedding cake then washed it down with as much of the open bar wine as I could manage to take before being cut off. I found myself in the middle of conga-lines and “cupid shuffle” formations. I spoke to relatives who I hadn’t spoken to in years, and then promptly remembered exactly why it was that I chose not to keep in touch with any of them. It was the most I had enjoyed myself in a while. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I found myself cornered by Denise again.
“Sorry if John-Paul was a little intense back there,” she yelled in between the music and commotion, “he just really likes his job.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” I responded, yelling back, “What is it that you guys do anyway? I still don’t understand.”
“It’s like multi-level marketing,” she said, “We basically get paid to sell these little vitamin pills to people, then those people sell them to someone else.”
“Oh,” I responded. The gravity of Denise’s friend’s act the night prior bore a greater weight, all of a sudden.
By this point, I had enough drinks in me to speak with more candor than I generally do.
“I feel like that isn’t stable.”
“What?”
“I said I feel like that isn’t stable.”
“What do you mean you feel disabled?”
We were both drunk and it was too loud for either of us to hear or pay attention with sincerity. Besides, if I was going to chastise someone about what they choose to do for a living – never mind on their wedding day – then I wasn’t any better than John-Paul. I smiled and shook my head, so as to dismiss this negative line of dialogue I had unintentionally created.
“You know Charnelle is doing a conference tomorrow in Ocean City,” she said. “It’s supposed to be an exclusive event, only for 7000 credit level members, but I can probably get you a pass for it.”
“What the hell is a credit?” I responded in a futile attempt for clarification.
“I am so drunk right now, I’ll tell you tomorrow. Just meet me in the lobby at 9am, we’ll head out together.”
“Don’t you wanna sleep in? It’s the morning after your wedding day.”
“Charnelle says sleep is the cousin of death.” noted Denise, she wrote an address on a napkin and slid it to me. 1500 Business Park Drive, Ocean City, Maryland.
I wasn’t really sure what to make of any of this, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat mystified. I don’t remember explicitly agreeing to anything, but the napkin was on my dresser when I woke up in the morning. I took a quick shower, dressed myself, and sat in the lobby to wait for Denise.
II
“So who exactly is Charnelle?” I asked as we walked to the parking lot, “Is she like… your boss?”
“Kinda,” replied Denise, “She’s everyone’s boss, but she’s not really a boss, but everyone’s also their own boss.”
“Interesting.”
Their whole system seemed difficult to understand. In retrospect, this had to have been deliberate.
“So can I meet you at the address I gave you? It shouldn’t take more than an hour to get there.” said Denise.
“For sure,” I said, “Where exactly am I going? It’s in a business park?”
“Yeah,” replied Denise, “It’s the venue where we have all of our exclusive and private events. Just show them this when you come in.”
Denise handed me a badge. There was the logo for MultiVida, which consisted of a blue pomegranate-shaped berry enveloped by a red circle. There was no name or picture, but instead a white sticker with a dotted line, which I assumed was for writing my name. As I took a pen from my pocket, I flipped the card over to see a strange design on the back. Instead of a bar code or scanning strip, there was a long black squiggly line that almost looked like a signature. I wrote my name in big blocky letters and put the badge around my neck.
I got to the “venue” about an hour later, which turned out to be a Marriott in Ocean City. It was sandwiched in between a discount beach supplies store that occupied every corner of the main strip and a novelty t-shirt pressing shop. I looked through the window of the novelty t-shirt shop and the first design I saw on display was of Heath Ledger’s Joker with the Backwoods logo inscribed underneath it. The shirts were absurd and laughable like an artificial intelligence had taken odd snippets of street conversation and popular culture, and screen printed them onto shirts. And it was next to this place that our “exclusive and private” meeting place was. It was hardly a business park.
Upon walking into the Marriott, there were roughly 70 people of vaguely Asian descent milling about the lobby in what looked like fairly traditional clothing. Each corner of the lobby had a speaker playing foreign indiscernible music, but were set up in such a way that the timing of each speaker was off, creating a massively disorienting delay effect. While this made my hangover exponentially worse, there was a vibe of happiness and celebration, much akin to that of Denise and John-Paul’s party the night prior. As Denise and I walked past a crowded group, a short elderly man came right up to me and shook my hand, exclaiming something in a language I had no understanding of. I laughed it off and continued to follow Denise, turning around to see the man the group stood with all staring at me.
“Denise, was that guy with your MultiVida group?” I asked, a nervous quiver in my voice.
“Oh, I have no idea. I doubt it, Charnelle would not dig his vibe.”
We walked deeper into the hotel, in a long hallway that had a forty-five-degree turn. We passed a long and furnished bar. Past that, there were two huge event halls. In the first room there was a reception set up, with what I later found out was traditional Laotian wedding decorations. From my far vantage, I could see pink fluorescent light spilling out from a door, with hundreds of cheap foldable chairs set up facing the stage. My tired body was still hungover from the night prior, and I shielded my eyes as I entered the room
“Shhh, it’s okay. Let’s have a seat,” Denise whispered in my ear, although I hadn’t said anything that would have prompted a shush.
We sat far too close to the front for my comfort level. I felt the blood rush to my head as a hypertension head began to set in. I rubbed my temple and looked towards my cousin, who was staring intently at the empty stage.
“Hey Denise, do you have anything for a headache? I think I’m a little hungover from last night,” I laughed off, praying that I would not have to sit through whatever was about to happen with a raging migraine.
She very quickly picked up her purse, scrounging around for my request. Her eyes withdrew immediately back to the stage and she handed me a bottle of pills.
“Take these,” she said, “It’s a homeopath Charnelle has us sell. They’re nutmeg.”
In January of 2014, the Illinois Poison Center released a study on the effects of what they called “nutmeg intoxication”. The sample size was fairly small, only containing thirty participants, but they found that as little as 10 grams (or two teaspoons) of nutmeg are enough to get an adult man to experience mild dizziness and confusion. At intakes of up to 50 grams, nutmeg can induce full-on hallucinations. I did not know this at the time of taking these pills, nor did I know exactly how much nutmeg each pill contained. The only thing I can be sure of is that I cannot totally be sure of whatever happened beyond this point.
I walked away from the pink room and towards the bar. Already at nearly ten in the morning, there were several people drinking at the bar. There were two Laotian men drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons, and another man further down with four to five empty reddish-orange glasses in front of him. I met the bartender’s eye line.
“Can I just get a glass of water?” I asked sheepishly.
“You betcha kid. Ya want anything else?” The bartender asked. It was a strange accent, one that was most definitely not from Maryland.
I shook my head as he gave me a glass of water, which I used to muster down two of the pills Denise had given me. I pulled out my wallet to pay and he lumbered his whole body towards me hostilely.
“No charge.” he said with an off-putting level of anger.
“Well, just take it for the tip anyway.” I responded.
“No gratuity either.” he delivered in the same tone.
I timidly put my wallet back into my pocket and swallowed forcefully. The bar was secluded enough from the lobby that the overlapping Laotian music could only be heard distantly, but now a Gwen Stefani song had taken its place.
“You like ska?” asked a voice from across the bar.
At first I could not place a name to the face. It was a man I had recognized from my youth, someone that was on television or an old show. It was Matt Lauer, a Co-Host of the Today show who had disgraced his name and reputation with a series of sexual assault allegations.
“I’m Matt Lauer,” said Matt Lauer, “I’m on the Today show.”
“Didn’t you get fired?” I questioned.
This was the only thing I could possibly think to ask at this moment.
“We’re all just trying to make a dollar out of 99 cents.” he said with a coy smile.
My eyes widened with a strange astonishment and confusion. I had not seen or heard from the man ever, and felt like I was in the presence of some apparition. His hair was sheet white. He looked completely disheveled and disgusting. The gray suit he was wearing was stained with rips and ruffles everywhere and smelled like a stale bedsheet. He motioned for me to come over to him. I reluctantly stumbled over towards the other end of the bar and sat next to this man.
“Barman!” he called. “Two more Bahama Mamas.”
It was 10:12 am, and I was still hung over from the night prior. Matt had a sort of sinister charm to him, like he had a secret to tell.
“Do you have a calculator on you?” He quickly pondered, seemingly snapping out of a haze.
“No, I don’t. I do have my phone though – ,”
“Not gonna do, I need one of those big graphing ones,” he interrupted. “I gotta crunch some of these numbers.” He pretended to look into the distance behind me. There was nothing behind us. He turned to look back.
“Why’d you start talking to me?”
“What?”
There was a noticeable rise in my pitch. It was hard to hear him over the thumping music, which shook the barstools. I could feel a haze coming over my thoughts. The orange Bahama Mama was still in front of me, slowly condensating with every second I let it melt. I looked up from the drink to see Matt Lauer absolutely draining his, the glass far past half empty. For the amount of alcohol he had clearly consumed, he showed no clear signs of inebriation. His posture was upright and firm and his speech was crisp and deliberate. He slammed the rounded glass cup onto the wooden bar table, burping before returning his attention to me.
“Is this guy talking to me?” He genuinely wondered allowed.
I could not discern if he was unable to keep his thoughts inside his head, or if he was speaking to some different person that I could not see. I swiveled my head around to see more Laotian people at the bar, speaking what I can only assume was Laotian, with pink light still emanating from the seminar room. It was at this point I noticed that his sheet white hair was falling out all around him. He picked up a clump and handed it to me.
“Are these yours?” he asked.
Questioning whether or not I should pick up the drink, I realized I had left Denise in the room by herself when I had left to take her medicine. Turning the pill bottle around in my hand, I stepped off the barstool and slid my Bahama Mama in front of Matt Lauer in one nearly fluid motion. My attempt at an Irish exit was feeble and poor.
“Hey, level with me.” Matt somberly spoke, making dead eye contact with me. “Are you the guy from earlier?”
“No,” I replied. “But I do have to find my cousin. I’ll see you around, I guess.” My voice trailed off as I stepped away from the man.
“Not if I see you first, friendo.” He chuckled, gripping a knuckle around my undrank Bahama Mama. “Bar man!” I heard him yell this as I turned back towards the seminar hall.
The room was exactly as I had left it, but from this vantage I had a greater sense of the room’s capacity. There were two groups of ten or more women (with some men, presumably husbands or boyfriends) that were all wearing the same silk pants suits with the six inch Jimmy Choo heels. Besides these people, there were less than a dozen other people in the room, myself and Denise included. In the very front row there were two elderly women in construction gear, both of whom had walkers with neon green and orange reflective tape.
I slowly meandered back to where Denise sat, who was still staring up at the empty stage, waiting for something, anything to happen. I lost my balance and stumbled over a chair, unable to keep myself fully upright. I felt a fog come over my thoughts, clouding my better judgement. I fell into the seat next to Denise, bringing my heavy eyes up to hers.
“Hey D-Denise, what was, uh, what was in those pills you gave to me?” I slurred at her.
“Oh, this stuff?” She asked, snatching the bottle from my loose grasp. “This is the essence of MultiVida! It’s a cure all, so it should do the trick with whatever you got going on up in there.”
When she said ‘up in there’ she tapped on my head, ruffling my hair a bit. I felt weak, as if I was succumbing to some sort of poison. I was powerless to protest whatever was going on, and whatever was about to happen. I was completely subject to whatever the circumstances would hold for me. I felt true and genuine fear for the first time in a while, not the kind you get from watching horror movies, though. This was an entirely primal kind of fear.
“I think she is about to come on soon!” Denise excitedly whispered in my ears.
Such was not the case, however. Several more minutes passed, with two more Gwen Stefani songs playing as the lights flashed from pink to purple. I felt like I was having an out of body experience, watching myself and this hotel hall from some third-person perspective. All of a sudden, the music stopped and the lights flashed to a deep shade of indigo.
Emerging from behind some maintenance door, a small old man waddled to the side of the stage. He was wearing thin wire frame glasses, an argyle vest over a neat oxford shirt. His laughably baggy khaki pants came up nearly past his belly button. There were no set of stairs, so he sort of rolled onto the platform, throwing what looked like a cane up on stage with him. It took him a moment to regain his footing, but he eventually hoisted himself up with a firm hand on the speaker podium in the middle of the stage. His hair was long and parted down the middle, grayed with age and crinkled. His back was hunched extraordinarily, nearly a full 45 degrees forward. In his left hand he had a white knuckle clench on his cane, and with his right hand he adjusted the wirey microphone in front of him thoroughly, creating all sorts of crackling and whistling through the speakers. He cleared his throat, licked his lips, and began thusly:
“How did you feel the last time you got fucked?”
He spoke with a very clearly fake English accent. There was zero possibility of this man actually being from England. He spoke like David Bowie with a mouthful of marbles.
“The institutionals of our society have told us that our sexual urges are anatural and unmoral. That fulfilling the simple desire to feel pleasure is beyond the norms and accepted behaviors of populist discourse. I want to misspell this emotion. The only meaning-filled pursuit is that of absolute pleasure. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake. We’re told by the Orwellian Marxist Liberals and the media they have bought alike that the limits of our hedonism cannot know no bounds. Never question when you have to stop! Rebel! I decree to you all fine MultiVida shareholders. Rebel! Have your cake then eat it too! Make your beds and refuse to lie in them! But are we not creatures with free will? We are greedy, lustful savages; it is the truth of our human nature. My friend will help us unlock that.”
He paused for a moment.
“Please welcome, Charnelle DuPree. It is time for darkness.”
Instantly, every light in the room shut off.
“It’s happening now.” said Denise, turning to me.
Denise sounded less excited and more like this was an assertion of fact.
Suddenly a single spotlight shone on stage left of the stage then quickly panned over to the right to reveal a casket. The old, incomprehensible, and definitely not British man began slowly pushing the casket to the center of the stage until it was firmly in the middle. He uncovered the top half of the casket to reveal a woman lying there.
Denise and the rest of the audience gasped in near unison. This was Charnelle.
She was wearing a silk white pantsuit and had bleach blonde hair. Her cheekbones looked like bricks from botox; her faux eyelashes protruded 4 inches from her face. Suddenly, she shot out of the casket sitting 90 degrees upright. This elicited another wave of audible surprise from the sparse group of attendees. The old incomprehensible man handed her a microphone. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” started to play through the conference room speakers. Charnelle rose from the casket and sang:
“If I leave here tomorrow… Would you still remember me?”
III
The time for confusion was over. Nothing after this point, especially given everything that had happened thus far, was going to make any sense. There was hardly any use in trying to understand it. The only thing I could do was let it happen. I watched this human Barbie Doll sing “Free Bird” for ten whole minutes, complete with pantomiming the extended guitar solo at the close of the song. With every sharp motion she made as she frantically danced around, you could faintly hear the heels of her shoes clicking and scraping across the linoleum stage. There was no cheering; no singing along; no participation at all from the audience. Every single person in there just stared super intently at the stage. Faces ranged from awestruck fascination to almost meditative-like concentration. Beside me, Denise would look carefully at the stage for a number of seconds then write frantically in the little notepad she had taken to the lecture. I tried to see what she could possibly be writing, but the lights were too colorful to tell apart the scrawled ink from the paper. At the end of this intense one woman show, the lights instantly came back on and returned to their standard hue. Just as that happened – literally at the flip of a switch – the entire 15 or so other people in this giant hotel lecture hall started cheering fervently. None of their cheering felt even remotely sincere. It was less like they were cheering for Charnelle and more each member of the audience was trying to outdo the other in their effusive praise of Charnelle; trying to win her recognition, even though there were hardly any people there to try and stand out amongst.
“Thank you! Thank you!” Charnelle doubly stated with her hands grasping outward at the audience. “What is up MultiVida level 7000 shareholders of the regional mid-Atlantic division!?”
This reignited the same competitive and self-indulgent applause as before, but after about five seconds of cheering, Charnelle swiftly raised her hand and instantly every single person in the hall stopped. You could hear a pin drop.
“You people are here today because you made a choice that a lot of the slackers and whiners in this country don’t have the guts to make. You guys are here because you want to be rich. R-I-C-H. Rich. Go ahead and say it; it isn’t a dirty word. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I want to be rich. I want to be richer than everyone else. I want to buy and wear things that other people can’t have just because they don’t have the money for it.”
She spoke somehow both politely and disdainfully in the same tone of voice. It was bright and enthusiastic but with a certain level of sheer arrogance and domineeringness that was jarring to listen to. She didn’t want to sound relatable, her rhetoric was far past the point of relatability. I spaced out of her monologue until a couple words shook me out of a haze.
“Do you know why I like money? Because everything else in life is immaterial. What does it mean to be happy or to be content or fulfilled? If I can’t prove it, if I can’t see it, If I can’t ever really know, then what’s the point? These things are frauds. Abstract ideas that will never give you any answers. Do you need answers? Look in your wallet, look at your bank account. There’s concrete proof of your worth. Not anyone else’s, yours. Goodnight Ocean City.”
It was hard to reflect about this. It was hard to think of much of anything. Before I knew it, everyone was applauding enthusiastically again, the lights came on, and the rough dozen other people in the lecture hall were being hustled out by tall and wide security guards. When we were shoved out of the room, the Laotian wedding had spilled out into the lobby. There were now almost three times as many people as there were in the beginning and they were absolutely swarming around the lobby, nobody was standing still for longer than three seconds. A group of children wandered over to me and pointed up at my face with seeming concern. I touched my own face to feel my hand nearly burning off at the touch of my cheek. I needed to find water fast. Suddenly, four Laotian men grabbed me from behind and started dragging me towards the dance floor.
“I know you! I know you! I know you!” one of them chanted, as he pulled me away.
“What?”
“You’re the one who is wealthy!” another said.
“No you’ve got the wrong guy I’ve got to get –”
“You’re our leader!” the first one shouted again!
I wrestled myself off of them and hurried off of the dance floor to find any kind of refuge. As I’m pushing my way through all this chaos, I got a glimpse through a slightly open door back into the lecture hall in which the event had been held. In there, I could see Charnelle’s figure hunched over on stage and vomiting onto the floor. She was grasping a bottle of MultiVida pills in one hand and was propping herself up on her knee with the other. Suddenly, her body jerked upright and her arm twitched to the side. Her face morphed uncannily and she fell in a heap of plastic surgery onto the floor. This managed to panic me even more than I already was. Nothing like this had ever happened to my body before. My sweat started to sting my pores. The dissonant and delaying music was still blaring. Finally, I noticed a glass sign hanging above a dark doorway that read “Restrooms” with the little “male” and “female” icons next to it. The light in the hallway was broken, and when I stumbled down the hallway, I had to feel for a door. The first door I pushed against I fell into and down onto concrete. I picked myself up off of the concrete to find myself at my college graduation. I was standing on the sidewalk above the football field of the school I went to, looking down on my graduating class. I could see my parents sitting with my girlfriend at the time. They all looked a lot younger. I could see my friends lining the packed stands. People I loved, people I didn’t know I had remembered; people I kept in touch with, people who had died. Everyone. Everyone was right there. And sure enough, amid all of it, there was me. Excitedly sitting upright and anxiously awaiting my diploma. I recognized myself instantly. I’m pleased to find that my appearance hasn’t changed a ton, when I remember this event was a little over a year ago. When I look closer I start to realize that everyone is actually in wheelchairs. Everyone graduating and everyone in the audience. And when the dean of the school stepped up to the mic, I recognized her voice.
“Good afternoon graduating class of 2021!” Charnelle shrieked from the podium.
“No no no no no no no…” I could hear myself saying as I stumbled backwards.
I fell back through the doorway and found myself in the dark hotel room hallway. A man stepped over me and walked into the doorway I had now left open. All of a sudden it was a bathroom again. I picked myself off of the ground again, struggling to get myself oriented and found myself clinging to the sink. I could feel something brushing against my hand and when I looked down I could see it was covered with chalky white hair. I looked in the mirror to see a familiar face standing behind me.
“Howdy partner!”
It was Matt Lauer. I couldn’t believe it.
“I’m just doing my nightly affirmations if you want to join me!” He cheerily invited.
Suddenly, Matt Lauer grabbed the mirror with both hands gritting his teeth. He nearly pulled it clean off of the wall. His hands and entire body were trembling; white hair was falling out all around him. He looked himself dead in the eye and said:
“I am going to kill God.”
He repeated this over and over again. Adding fervor to his chant every time he repeated it, getting faster and faster and louder and louder until he was full on screaming it. I started scrambling off of the sink, my feet slipping and sliding on the wet floor. I finally got to a stall and started to vomit inside of it. Underneath the stall next to me I could see the bottom of a wheelchair with a man’s shoes with pants around its ankles as well as another six-inch pair of Jimmy Choo heels doing the same. The wheelchair was gyrating back and forth aggressively while the woman was holding herself up and banging against the door of the stall as she moaned.
I heard the apparently wheelchair-bound man exasperatedly yell, “I’m gonna work until I die!” as he came closer and closer to reaching climax.
I puked one more time in the toilet but this time when I got up it looked at me and said:
“Don’t try and escape.”
The toilet suddenly ran out of the bathroom and tore down the hallway. Then I blacked out.
IV
I woke up in a hotel room the following afternoon. I had no idea exactly how long I had been out, but it was around 3:30 the following day. I was surprised to find Denise coming out of the bathroom with a glass of water.
“Hey buddy,” she coaxed. “You hanging in there?”
“Sorta, what happened?” I asked.
“I think you just went a little too hard the night before. You’ll be good though, just keep drinking; I’ve seen worse,” she replied.
“What on Earth did you take me to?”
“What do you mean?”
“The bizarre speeches? Matt Lauer? Graduation? The bathroom? Any of that?”
“Yeah, the pills can be a little freaky sometimes. Sorry about that. I dated a guy that did a lot of acid once. He turned out okay. I think he’s, like, living in some commune now.”
I realized I wasn’t going to get any more answers. There wasn’t anything even to be answered. What I had seen I know I’ve seen. There’s no way of shaking it. Ever since the events of Ocean City, Maryland, I’ve been serially reading the stories of people who believe themselves to have survived an alien abduction. I’m not entirely sure if aliens exist and I’m fairly skeptical that we’ve ever actually encountered them, but I’m moved by the sheer level of faith and conviction that the people who claim to have been captured by aliens tell their stories with. No matter the insurmountable evidence before them, no matter the alternative explanations or alibis, no matter how utterly outrageous the stories are, there are uniformly zero shreds of doubt in their minds. I watched one YouTube interview with a guy explaining his abduction. He looked into the camera with dead sincerity and, before the world and the eyes of God, uttered that he was once kidnapped by a race of Amazonian-like, 7-foot-tall female space aliens and copulated with them in order to start an entirely new race of alien-human hybrid super-beings. He said that for the moments that he was inside of these aliens, he could see the past, present, and future all at once. He saw the creation of the universe and the shaping of our solar system. He saw mankind rise from the dirt, entire civilizations built and destroyed. He saw his own death, the futures of his children and their deaths and eventually the end of time itself, all within an instant. He didn’t stutter once. No part of him seemed unsure or wary. It didn’t at all seem rehearsed. Whatever this man had seen, he was confident in it.
The trip to Ocean City made me really question what I believe. The epistemology of my very existence. I know nothing at all about myself yet. I don’t know what or who to value; where I should be or where I’m even going. Just like the man from the space sex anecdote, all I know is what I’ve seen. That is why I, dearest reader, am handing you this letter of resignation from my job. I have to tear down everything I know. Every single trapping of my material existence must be re-evaluated. Do not provide me with anything after I leave. I do not want a reference. If anything, please destroy or remark any files related to my existence. I will be building myself together again.
The End.
Gerard Allen and Nathan Zakim