Introduction and Table of Contents

ad pedum litterae. latin. literally, 'to the foot of the letter'. transliterally, 'exactly as written'.

This is the place where I'm posting my literary work. I tend to be a very listless writer, often starting projects without even the faintest hope of completing them. I'm trying to change that, by working on several short stories which I hope to have published collectively. There are currently 10 short stories being noodled on at the moment for this work, a mild number when compared to the sheer volume of work that I've started and never finished which now just floats around on various media in my home.

I'm also eager to hear constructive criticism of my work. please allow some leniency for spelling errors and grammar mistakes. These are not edited, it is exactly as they are while I'm working on them, and thus, quite rough.

What follows is a list of my current works and their approximate completion levels. The percentages listed are based on my personal thoughts of where they will end up. It's a mix of completion of the story itself, the number of characters, and ratio of outline to final text. It's a very complicated system full of rules and guides... which basically means that it's very extremely arbitrary and based on my opinion. So, I might not change anything and yet decide one day that something is 40% when the day before it was 60%

Writing Project Contents - Something that I'm working on with Mike as a constant stream of short stories, check often for new work.

About A Girl - Novella - Rough Draft @ 35% - Last Update 03/07/07 - 24,749 Words - 132,130 Characters

A bizarre tale of woe dedicated to all those that have ever lived life and lost.

About A Girl is a story about a girl, but not quite. He's a guy like any other, who meets a girl unlike every other, and they live a life that cannot be described in a blurb like this. But, like so many other stories, things go wrong, and he embarks on a journey, similar to running away with your tail between your legs.

This is something I started on back in 2003, where it's remained. I've finally gotten around to working on it again, but I'm trying to get it cleaned up a little bit first. I've had a lot of thoughts on what to do with it, and i feel much more comfortable with it. picking through it tonight, i realized how much I've been missing this story.

03.07.07 - Heavy update of grammar and spelling, very little content changed.


Chelsea - Short Story - Rough draft complete. - First draft editing not started. - Last Update 03/07/07 - 16,130 Words - 86,033 Characters

We delve into our minds to escape, but what happens when our minds want out?

Chelsea is the girl next door. He's madly in love with her, and known her all of his life. This lands her in prison and him on the news, and his life spirals down from there. We meet up with him many years later to find that his world is more than just a little out of control.

This one started in the late part of 2005 and was considered a first rough draft by mid-2006. It needs work. A lot of work. I'm still hammering out a few ideas to get this thing to where it needs to be, so the words it contains will be safe from harm... for now.

03.07.07 - Extremely heavy editing of grammar and spelling, very little content changed.


Broken - Short story - Rough draft @ 70% - Last Update 03/11/07 - 14,631 Words - 78,958 Characters

She's just a girl, until one night she becomes a killer. Self defense or not, it's shattered her on some level, and now she's expected to just move on with her life.

This is a much more recent story idea. It started as an email to a friend who'd asked about my writing. I didn't want to inundate her with anything, so the first 2 pages you read here are actually what i sent her, just so she'd understand what my writing was like. Oddly, it stuck with me and I decided to work on it.

03.11.07 - Heavy update of spelling and grammar, very little content change.


Old and New - Short Story - Rough Draft @ 35% - Last Update 03/20/07 - 6,092 Words - 33,192 Characters

A mysterious old man, a troubled young girl. He wants to help her, so that she doesn't take the path he may once have chosen. Everything is fine, until she uncovers just what that path was, and he has to protect himself. Again.

This is also recent. Another friend was asking for story ideas for a film class she's taking. I obliged with about 10, but this one sorta stood out to me, and i decided to take a stab at it. It stood out to her too, so I'm really curious to see how they converge and diverge or if they even meet somewhere in the middle.

03.20.07 - Heavy update of content as well as spelling and grammar. Started forming the "B" of the story.

the billboard - short story - rough outline @ 10%

the billboard is a working title, merely referring to the main device of the plot so far. it's a short story about a man driving to work, until he hits a snag, and his day changes completely, which makes sense, given the billboard that held his attention so tightly, it reads: "something amazing is about to happen to you."

this was something a little different. somehow, i heard these words while doing something else, and they caught me. i decided to find a way to make them into a story. this is the start of just such a story, though, it's not the only way i plan to use them.

The Dream - Short Story - Rough Outline @ 100% - Last Update 04/29/07 - 2,599 Words - 14,034 Characters

This is more just an idea for the ending of another story I'm working on, using different characters and a different scenario. I want to see if I can pull off the effect I'm looking for. It's just a rough outline at this point, and it's only a few pages, but, I like it so far. It just needs a little polish is all.

Writing Project Contents

Writing Project -

Mike and I have both been feeling pretty stagnant of late, so we've decided to work on a new project based on random plots generated on a website. We've got a long list of potential stories, and we trade off picking one and and setting a deadline of a few days to write something.

The rules are that it has to be at least 500 words, and must fit the plot that we're given, and we need to at least make a solid effort to finish.

The goal is simple: keep writing, keep fresh, and keep practicing.

Every one of these pieces feels like it has potential, and they are all things that I'm hoping to revisit later. Mike and I have discussed potentially publishing a collaborative collection of short stories from this, which I think would be a lot of fun.

So far it's been pretty fun, and I'll be posting each short story piece as we go. (The dates listed are the due dates for each project, if you're curious).

Writing Project #1 - 2008_03_23

A sheriff survives a plane crash on the way to Mexico.

3,740 Words - 20,026 Characters

This was our first challenge, and I view it as a warm up, however I was pretty pleased with the story over all. This was an idea I'd had for a while, wanting to have a character that saw death and didn't realize it until later. When I started writing this story, I had something else in mind, and didn't realize I'd be using Death in it until I was a page and a half in.

Writing Project #2 - 2008_03_26

A researcher of deadly viruses goes on an ill-fated trip in a run-down apartment complex.

3,468 Words - 19,265 Characters

I had originally started trying to write this as set in Siberia, but after re-writing the first page about five or six times I settled on the story that was actually running around my head, this one.

Writing Project #3 - 2008_04_02

A dejected geek acquires the ability to read minds after he loses everything.

6,550 Words - 35,194 Characters

This one is the longest I've done so far, and the one I'm most disappointed in. I really liked the idea of this story, and really wanted to do something with it, but I found that there was no way to get it all done in such a short time frame. I am, however, actively trying to edit this one, and work on getting the story back on track.

This is the edited version, when I'm done with the second draft, it will take the first's place here.

Writing Project #4 - 2008_04_08

Feuding neighbors discover a shocking secret over the Winter

4,120 Words - 21,795 Characters

This one became a huge challenge for me. I had the neighbors all figured out, I was able to visualize them simply, I can tell you that Rene has both the TV and the movie versions of the highlander swords displayed in a case in his office, and that on his wall is a copy of Green Lantern #1 mounted in a mylar display case. Richard's kitchen has an extremely tacky duck print border all around it, which Richard hates but Mary thought he would love.

The problem wasn't the feuding, but the shocking secret. I had told Mike that I was giving up, and he just said, "No, pick something at random and go with it, even if it's stupid!"

Which I did, and it worked out alright. To be honest, I would love to continue this as a novella, rather than leaving it as a short story.

Writing Project #5 - 2008_04_11

A vampire tries to reunite with her family in the suburbs.

1,120 Words - 5,671 Characters

This one is not up yet because it's not due yet, but I've basically finished it. I wrote the assignment in the email and shot it off to Mike and then closed the lid on my laptop. Before the laptop was set back in its bag, inspiration struck and I hammered this out.

Writing Project #4 - 2008_04_08

Snow fell in huge sticky flakes, blanketing the world in white. It had been a mild winter. Rather than the typical Midwestern snow cover there had been, so far, only a light dusting here, and a freezing rain there. Prior to this morning the world had been a dim, bland, palette of browns.

Rene was ok with that. He wasn’t a big winter person, unlike most of his mid-20’s friends. He really wasn’t into snowmobiling and ice fishing. Of course, he wasn’t really a summer person either, while he enjoyed camping and the occasional hike, he didn’t own an ATV or a boat of any kind, and you would rarely see him doing anything that could be considered a sport, unless writing had become a sport.

Creative writing was a passion for him, but technical writing was how he put food on the table for himself and his wife, and, God willing, the baby that might someday come. He had tried to have some of his creative work published, but so far he’d only had one piece accepted anywhere; afterward he’d discovered they were a purveyor of ‘Science Fiction Erotica’. The story was accepted, but he’d never been paid since it had never seen print, which he guessed was due to the fact that it contained no ‘erotica’ what-so-ever.

So technical writing paid the bills, even if he didn’t have the same love for doing it. He worked for a small firm that did contract work for other businesses who didn’t staff their own writers. For the most part, he enjoyed the work. He go to check out plenty of new products and services. He also knew that there might actually be thousands of people reading something he wrote, even if it was simply the user manual for a high end drill bit for specialized application in a particular machine shop drill.

This cold February morning he stood in his living room with a steaming cup of coffee in his hand, staring out of his living room picture window at the snow as it piled up. It was already inches deep having snowed all night, and it wasn’t supposed to let up for another couple hours. He owned the second to the last house, of only two houses, on a small dead end road in an outer most suburb of the cities, meaning that he was as far from his downtown offices as is possible before being considered rural. He was having a hard time convince himself to undertake the grueling morning commute. He’d been in the professionally world for only 6 years since graduation from college, and in that time he’d only missed two days of work. In the end, his good sense won out, and he walked down the hall to his modest home office, opened the door, sat down at the desk, and lifted the panel to his laptop computer.

He hoped that he could get some work done before Richard, his neighbor, started in with his snow thrower, snow mobile, and whatever other loud snow contraptions he had hiding in that monolithic shed of his. The sound drove Rene crazy and made it absolutely impossible for him to concentrate. It was one of the many things he absolutely hated about the man, that he always had some new machine to rev and roar. He sighed, and opened folder on the desktop, took a sip of coffee, and tried to dive into his work.

“You’re like a big kid, Rich!” chided Mary, his wife, setting a plate of bacon and scrambled eggs down in front of him.

“I know. I know! But this winter’s been so bleak, and you know how bad I’ve wanted to get out on the Z1!” as he said it, he knew how immature he sounded.

“I know Richard, I know.” Mary sat down on the opposite side of the table. He noticed how gracefully she was aging. Even though she was only a few years younger than he was, she looked like 40-something to his late 50’s.

He’d retired a few years back, after dedicating the majority of his life to selling insurance. He had planned, saved, and when he turned 50 he happily walked away from the working world to settle into his family’s land, north of the cities. When it had been his Grandfather’s land, it was one of his fondest memories, riding in the family sedan to visit him. They were so far from everything when they were out there; it was a completely different world.

Of course, times had changed. Now there were housing developments inching closer and closer toward him, more shopping centers popping up along the county road that lead past, which had grown to two lanes. When the village became a city, they began parceling out more land and paved his road that now ended in a cul-de-sac. When his neighbor bought his tract, Richard had gone to the city to protest the sale, saying that he was infringing on his land. When that didn’t work, he demanded a survey, and then he began bringing various law suits and things, trying desperately to keep his property clear. He just wanted to be able to look out of any window and see only nature.

He couldn’t understand why anyone would buy a parcel so close. He couldn’t understand why it was the man didn’t want more privacy.

“You going to take it all the way back, dear?”

“Maybe, depending on snow cover, why?” He knew the answer before she gave it, but was really hoping that she wouldn’t.

“He’s asked you very nicely, Richard.”

“I can’t believe you’re still taking his side in this!”

“I’m not taking his side,” her tone was always calm, even when they argued, and it drove him crazy, “but he does work out of the home, and he’s asked you very nicely not to drive around here during the day while he’s working.”

“He wouldn’t have that problem if he hadn’t moved onto my land!”

“It’s not your land, and you knew that it was only a matter of time before people started moving out here.”

He hated it when she was right, so rather than acknowledge it, she just snorted and took a sip of his coffee. Still, she had a point, and he knew it. He would take it back onto the property, just past the pond and up the stream a little bit.

“Besides, how would you have felt if someone went snowmobiling outside of your office everyday while you were trying to work?”

“Yes, Mary, you’ve made your point.”

She hummed satisfactorily, kissed him on the forehead and walked laboriously into the next room. He was left to brood alone, sipping his coffee. He poked at a strip of bacon with his fork and put it in his mouth.

The snow lay on the ground in a thick blanket; the trees that had yesterday been barren and brown were now caked in white. Eight inches had fallen and left the world a completely different landscape. “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” played over and over in a loop through Rene’s mind as he sat in his sunroom drinking a fresh cup of coffee, taking an afternoon break, and enjoying the blissful scene that spread out before him.

The quiet was why he’d moved out here. He’d been with his company for 4 years before they would finally let him work from home. He still had to go in every couple of weeks, but for the most part, he had escaped the office jungle.

He’d gotten a lot done today. To his relief, the roar of his neighbor’s snowmobile lasted only a few minutes before it trailed off into the woods. He watched out of his office window as Rich raced off through the trees, a spray of snow following in his wake. The rest of the day had been quiet, and he was thankful for it.

Rene stood up and started to walk back to his office, but a gentle knock at the back door diverted him. The inevitable question was who it could be. By the time he reached the door though, he’d figured that it had to be one of his neighbors, and since he hadn’t heard the roar of the snow machine’s return, he assumed that it could only be, “Mary! Nice to see you, how are you?”

“I’m good, Rene, how are you today?”

“Good, just been working. To what to I owe the pleasure?” She looked worried and he opened the door to let her into the kitchen, “Come in, please.”

She made her way inside, the soft black rubber tip on her cane made a soft thudding sound with every other step. Rene knew that she’d been in a car accident years ago and that walking was very difficult for her. She thanked him and sat down at the table, hooking her cane on the edge of the table. He offered a drink but she politely declined.

“I’m worried about Richard.” She said it like someone who didn’t want to say something, like she’d been trying to find the courage for a while. He said nothing, but waited for her to continue, and after a minute she did, “He didn’t come back at lunch he’s not answering his phone, and it’s really not like him.”

Rene started to see where she was going with this, and he started trying desperately to figure out how to get out of it. “Have you thought about calling the police?”

“I did call them; they said that they couldn’t go looking for him because I’m worried and that they couldn’t do anything until he’d been missing for at least 24-48 hours.”

Rene had to admit that he wasn’t really surprised by this, and was wondering why she was so worried. “Oh.” He realized how stupid he sounded, but he really didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t that he really wished his neighbor harm, but he couldn’t say that he’d be too upset if the man just never came home, given the amount of grief that he’d cause him even before they were actually neighbors.

“Listen, I know it sounds crazy, but he and I have been married for 24 years, I know my husband very well. He didn’t come home for lunch, and I know that means there’s something wrong. I really need your help Rene.” Something in her voice told him that she was very serious, and very concerned, “Please, take Richard’s other snow mobile and follow his track. Find out where he is and get help to him.”

Rene sighed and ran his fingers through his short brown mop of hair, “Ok, but I’m under a deadline right now, and I probably only have another 20 minutes of solid work to do for today. That way he’ll have a little more time to make it home.” He glanced at the clock on the wall, 3:32, he said, “If he’s not home by 4 o’clock, I’ll go look for him, okay?”

“Thank you very much,” she said, sounding very relieved. He liked Mary, she seemed a pleasant woman, and he had a feeling that she played a big role in the quiet he was getting to work. He really did want to help her, but he always really hoped that her husband would come roaring back sometime in the next 28 minutes.

Rene sat on the snowmobile, which idled under him. She pointed out the controls and told him to be very careful on the throttle, since this machine would do over 90 miles, which was “way too fast through the woods,” then she added as an aside, “way too fast in general if you ask me.”

He had dug the cold weather gear out of the closet and put it on a little after 4 pm and trudged his way across his lot to theirs. She was waiting on the back porch, the worry lines on her face had deepened, and she flashed a weak smile at him. She led him over to the open shed and gave him the key to the Polaris, telling him it was Richard’s old one, which he found funny since it looked like it was brand new.

She made sure he had their phone number on his cell phone, and he took off.

The snow had stopped falling hours ago, and the wind had been pretty calm. The woods on their property were pretty thin for a good four acres back, past the big bond that spanned their line. Richards’s tracks were still very clear in the snow, and Rene followed along them at a reasonable pace, trying to get used to riding the machine, which handled like nothing he’d ever driven before.

He wore a pair of ski goggles that Mary had pulled out for him, telling him that he’d be glad of them. He realized that she was right as he picked up speed, passing the little pond and moving into the thicker cover. The snow was still pretty thick, but branches and brush broke up more frequently, and the trees were heavier, and while he found he was starting to enjoy the ride, he was having to speed up and slow down to follow Rich’s slalom.

He was getting better at it though, he thought. And he was starting to see the appeal.

His eyes fluttered a few times, the pupils rolling around in their sockets. It was dark, and he was in pain. He had been knocked out. Something had happened while he was riding his sled. It was dark, but his eyes were adjusting to the light, which seemed to be coming from somewhere high above him. On his back, he surveyed the cavern that held him.

He tried to sit up, but there was a sharp pain somewhere in his back, his legs were pinned, and he dropped back down hitting his head again. His eyes rolled back again, and he lost consciousness again.

Rene had broken into a wide clearing, beginning to wonder how far back Richard had gone, he wondered if the man owned this entire tract, because it seemed to be going on forever. He was still following the fresh tracks, which seemed to be heading into the trees up ahead.

Richard woke up again, his head throbbed, a pulsating rhythm at the back of his skull. He tried to wiggle his various extremities, starting with his arms, which both seemed to work as he wiggled his fingers in front of his face. His legs, however, didn’t seem to be responding, and he could feel a great deal of pressure on his lower back.

He tried to roll one way, then he tried the other, but he was completely held in place. Instead of sitting up again, he just lifted his head and realized that his Z1 way lying completely across his body. He could tell though that there was something taking some of the pressure because he could tell he hadn’t been completely crushed. He contorted himself one way and then the other and saw that he was wedged underneath but the machine was being held up by some rocks on one side and a small ledge on another.

He was trapped.

Sighing heavily, he slowly laid his had back down on his rocky pillow.

With sudden inspiration, he patted his jacket pockets, looking for his cell phone, but realized with chagrin that he’d put in his jeans pocket. His jean pocket was under his bibs, and his cell phone is sitting under several hundreds of pounds of snowmobile.

“Shit.” His voice echoed around the small cavern with a sharp staccato on the high pitch of his whisper. He closed his eyes tight, and then opened them again, trying to examine his surroundings, hoping to figure out where he was exactly, and how long he’d been out.

On his right was a fairly smooth wall that seemed to be carved out of the rock, it seemed to go fairly high up to the ground above, and it disappeared at an slight angle out of sight. He wondered if this was some sort of old mining operation, perhaps someone had tried to find something and just covered over their hole when they decided they were bust.

Above him he saw the hole in the ceiling that he’d come in through, probably no more than 10 feet up in the air, but he saw no way to get up to it easily. There were 4 walls that sloped down from it, the first, with the slight angle, was the one he’d just been looking at. The other 3 walls seemed to make much steeper grades off into the inky blackness beyond the light from the hole. He guessed that it must have been late afternoon or early evening based on the light and the fact that his stomach was screaming for food.

Mary would have called for help by now, and it didn’t seem to be snowing anymore, so his tracks should be fairly easy to follow. He figured the sound of engines would be approaching very soon and they’d get him out of there within a few hours. He decided that it would be best to continue looking around, though, because he really didn’t want to think about his condition, or the rescue effort.

He looked back at the hole above him and followed the wall on his left down, expecting it to move out of his vision, disappearing into the darkness, but at about forty-five degrees it cut more or less straight down, and he followed the smooth rock face down to a spot about 10 feet away from him, and he gasped, loud. Then he held his breath and tried not to scream.

It had been almost an hour and a half straight back following the tracks before they started making a wide arc in a started to circle back the other way, carving out another path a few yards parallel to the first.

He’d broken into the last clearing and sped up through the wide expanse, pushing the throttle open all the way and soaring along the snow. He’d decided that he really did enjoy this, and that he couldn’t really blame Richard for his enthusiasm. It was actually quite exhilarating, being out in the snow, in the middle of nothing, riding fast over and sliding along the ground.

The new path was taking him right through the middle of the field, which was enormous, and absolutely barren. He was about to open up the throttle again when he saw something unusual just ahead of him. He almost didn’t catch it, but cut quick to his left and squeezed hard on the break, and the sled stopped so abruptly that he thought he be thrown or it would roll. He took a second to catch his breath and then heard Richard’s voice calling up from somewhere just a short distance away.

Rene trudged through the snow and found himself at the edge of a hole in the ground, out of which he could hear, faintly, the sound of Richard calling for help.

He looked down and saw the man lying at the bottom of some kind of cavern. He was pinned under his snow mobile, and Rene wondered how the thing had even fit down there since the hole in the ground seemed only big enough to fit a person, but he didn’t wonder long.

“Help me out of here!”

“Richard, how badly are you hurt?”

“Rene?!? Dear God, Mary got you to come out?!” He coughed a couple times and then chuckled, more to himself than Rene, “I guess it makes sense.” He looked up at him and shouted, “I’m can’t tell, I’m pinned.”

Rene stood up, about to pull out his cell phone to call for help.

“Wait!” Richard’s voice drifted out of the hole, “What are you doing?”

Rene leaned over the hole again, “I was going to call for help.”

“No!”

“What? Why not?” Rene had called this man crazy before, but he’d never thought he was actually insane.

“Just, wait, ok! Mary send you on my old sled?”

“Yes, but-“

“Bring the sled over and drop the cable for the power winch down, we’ll see if I can get out from underneath this thing.”

Rene looked saw the hook. He walked over to the sled drove the machine around a short distance from the hole. He unlatched the winch so that the cable pulled free and he pulled the length out and dropped the hook down the hole. He watched, wearily, as Richard wrapped the cabling around the steering column and secured it against itself.

“Alright, secure the winch, get on the sled and press the toggle switch down. Gently, it’s pressure sensitive! Go real slow, I’ll shout when I’m free!”

Rene walked the few paces back to the idling snowmobile, reached out and locked the gear on the winch back in place and then sat down on the machine. He pressed the switch gently until he heard the little motor whir as it took up the slack, and then it changed pitch and groaned in protest, but still, it wound slowly around the spindle, the little arm guiding in back and forth in tight spirals.

“I’m out, I’m alright!” The voice seemed so distant. Rene let go of the switch, about to lower the sled back down, but there was a sudden crack, and then a rumble and the world began to move and change. He jumped up off the sled as the ground gave way below it so that he was left, hovering just above the falling machine and rock for a moment before following it down into the hole.

He hit the ground and rolled over on the dusty floor and ended up in a mostly sitting position. He was surprised at his nimbleness. Richard was standing over him a moment later, lifting his legs up and down over and over, first left, and then right. He didn’t look at Rene but asked, “Are you alright.”

Rene stood up, brushing the dust off his snow pants and jacket, and said, “Yeah, I think I’m alright.”

“Where are we-?” He started asking the question and then saw Richard was staring over his shoulder, he turned and looked and gasped.

He had been certain his was laying on in enormous space ship, but didn’t really believe it until Rene made the hole so much bigger that light cast its way further into the cavern.

“Holy shit! Is this a-," Rene’s eyes were wide and his jaw was agape. Richard chuckled.

“I bet that’s how I must have looked just before you showed up.”

Rene shook his head and looked back at him, then looked back at the cavern wall which ended at the outer most wall of the hull of some kind of huge space craft. There wasn’t much exposed, but judging by the curve and the shape and the distance into the cavern, it seemed that it must have been at least as big as a sports stadium.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“I think so, yes,” Richard took a few steps toward it, slowly, tenuously.

Directly in front of them was what appeared to be a door, or hatch, of some kind, which was hanging completely open into the craft. In the doorway was a figure, like a small person, but mummified, its long fingers clinging to the edge of the frame. You just see the top of its oversized head, and the outline of its small body. The way that the ship was laying now, it was at maybe a forty-five or sixty degree angle, but the creature that they could see seemed to have been frozen in time quite literally hanging from the frame of the door, as though it had crawled all the way to the edge before it died. It looked as though it had been frozen there for a very long time. If you’d asked Richard, he would have guessed thousands of years.

The two men looked at each other, and Richard smiled and said, “I’ve got some flashlights in both sleds, care to take a look?”

Rene smiled as Richard threw him a flashlight and he said, “You think I could just walk from this?”

The two men walked to the edge of the ship and Richard took a long step into the door frame, his heart pounding with excitement. Somewhere, far away, there was a humming of some kind.

Writing Project #3 - Edit in Progress - 2008_04_04

William Esther sat alone on the bed of his apartment, buried under the blankets and pillows. The headphones of his iPod crammed deep into his ears, the volume up so loud that people in neighboring units could hear the grating death metal with perfect clarity. He wanted to think about a lot of things, but his own thoughts were almost completely lost to him. What he could think, when he could grab his own thought, was that his life hadn’t been terrible. As a matter of fact, he thought that his life used to be pretty good.

Even if he didn’t think so at the time.

He showed up for work early on Tuesday. He was running way behind on his project, designing the framework for a new database system that was supposed to be deployed in a few weeks as part of a huge software project that his company was working on. This was everything that the 60 person firm had hoped for, and it was everything that the company was working on. It was the sort of contract that would catapult a firm into the spotlight. Failure, as they put it, when announcing the project, was not an option.

His boss had taken him aside to talk with him on Monday. The result of the talk was that he was very close to losing his job and that if he didn’t get the project back on track, he would find himself not only jobless, but also financially responsible for their inability to launch on time. Words like ‘inept’, and ‘pathetic’ were used. He was told that his portion of the work wasn’t that difficult, even if it was time consuming, and he clearly knew how to do his job, or they wouldn’t have hired him. He was told that he needed to get his shit together, and fast. His boss said, “For you, right now, there’s no such thing as a 40 hour work week!”

So, that Tuesday morning he was there 3 hours early, before the sun was out and before the regular commuters had choked the streets. He was going to code like a man on fire. He knew what the problem was: he was tired. His guild had been on fire in their realm, and he was logging another 25-30 hours a week with his Paladin. He had been wondering, of late, if there was some sort of 12-step program for MMORPG players, because he knew, even before his boss yelled at him, that he had a problem.

He walked into his cubicle, three 4 foot walls where he had sparsely decorated with a Dilbert calendar and a couple of Star Wars miniatures (they were Storm Troopers, his favorite characters, even before he found out they were all just clones of Jengo Fett). He was cursing the fact that they didn’t allow the coders to take their work home with them. The client wouldn’t allow them to take any of the code offsite, as part of the NDA. He wiggled his computer’s mouse while slinging his backpack off his shoulder and onto the least cluttered part of his desk. He sat in his chair, pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del on his keyboard, tapped his password in and hit enter.

Then he looked up at his screen and realized that it was still black, the small light in the corner was still a dim amber, indicating that it was still napping. He ducked down to look under the desk, the normal soft hum of his system fans weren’t there. It their place was an acrid odor, something like that after a car peels out, of burned rubber. He looked at the indicator LEDs on the machine and found that it was blinking a fast red. Dead.

He knew a few things. He knew that there was something very wrong with his computer. He knew that the IT staff wouldn’t be in the building for several hours, and he knew that he hadn’t gone through the trouble of backing up his work in over 3 weeks. The backup process wasn’t automated, and he didn’t like sitting around for an extra half an hour to an hour every day just to tell the computer what to backup and where. He saw it as an extra half hour to an hour he could be running around with his guild.

He buried his face in his hands and sighed deeply, feeling sorry for himself. In his head, he ran through the most logical options, and he came to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense to wait around to get fired.

He tried a few times to restart the machine, but it would just beep manically at him every time. He opened the case and examined the components, but everything seemed to be in place: RAM, the hard drives, the all the cables and jumpers seemed to be seated just fine. Still, out of some deep seated hope, he plugged everything back in and tried to boot the system one more time.

Red light flashed, speaker beeped, and he felt completely defeated.

There was now a little over 2 hours before anyone else would be in, and he sat at his desk, ready to cry, ready to just leave and never come back. Then something occurred to him, and he stood up quickly and rushed down the hall, toward the server room.

He stepped inside the small air conditioned room that housed several big rack servers. He surveyed all the machines for a few minutes, deciding if he was about to make a huge mistake. Somewhere, deep inside, a little voice was shouting, “No!” He ignored the voice, walked over to the wall where a huge red sign said, “Emergancy Power Cut-off” and underneath was a small handwritten sign that said, “For use in extreme (fire!) situations only! WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS!” Taking a deep breath, he pressed the button in.

He could hear the various hard drive platters grinding to a halt. He pulled out the switch and listened as the various server machines began their start up process. He pressed the switch in again, and repeated this process over and over again for about ten minutes, until he was satisfied that there was a good chance that there would be a lot of missing data on the network.

He pulled the red switch out again and listened as the machines started up. There were a few speakers that started beeping, and he felt certain that he’d accomplished what he’d needed. He left the server room, went back to his desk, scooped up his backpack and went down the elevator of the downtown office building. He would sit in the coffee shop in the sprawling common area, and he would log on to his account with his laptop, just to check how the guild was doing. And in a couple hours, he would waltz back upstairs to discover that something was wrong with his machine. Everything, he thought, would be ok.

To say that he was an awkward geek would be considered an understatement. He grew up in the late 80’s playing Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering, and Super Mario Bros. He spent the rest of his time reading Tolkein, Gaimann, and comics like Spider-Man and X-Men. He loved both Star Wars, and Star Trek, so was very versatile in conversations about either. He hung out with other geeks at school. He messed around with computers, and eventually, he discovered the world of the internet through a series of chat rooms on CompuServe at a friend’s house.

The internet meant something new to him. In the real world he was a tall, gangly, weak, and pockmarked kid named William Esther. On the internet he could be whoever, and whatever, he wanted. He told everyone how cool he was. He still played a geek online, but he played the cool geek, one that still got girls, and had all the newest hardware for his computer. He started playing games online when he was in High School, but he told everyone that he was really much older and the system administrator for a big company in the city. He had friends online that were also cool; at least they also said they were cool, and to that end, he was happy.

His real life was mild by comparison. He would carefully take photos and then use Photoshop to clean up the acne so he’d look better, similar to the way that they make fashion models look good in the nudey magazines he stole from his dad. He got into Everquest when he was in College, and nearly didn’t graduate. His transcript looked so bad that it was everything he could do to get the entry level job that he was now at risk for losing.

Sitting in the little coffee shop, drinking a steaming hot Macchiato and scrolling through message boards, he noticed a girl in the corner typing on her laptop. He watched her tapping away on the keys of the little white Mac Book, the typical white iPod ear buds stuck in her ears. She was nursing a small glass bottle of Diet Coke. Her hair was dirty blonde, and she wore a hideous combination of dirty pink Cardigan and green and white scarf. She wasn’t beautiful, not in the typical sense, but he found something about her very sensual. He began thinking, and only thinking, about what he’d say to her. His brain’s fingers worked a virtual keyboard in his mind: “Hey hottie! Mind if I PM you?”

Then she looked up at him, and for a moment, they made eye contact, which he broke out of sheer terror. He’d only ever had a couple of girlfriends, and none of them lasted long. The inevitable argument of which was more important, them or the internet, would usually end with him clacking keys alone and drinking straight from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that night.

He just couldn’t interact with people in the real world. At least, not the way that he could online. He would have loved to have just asked her if he could join her. Inside he even thought that she might want him to, but the fact remained that there was nothing in the world that could give him the courage to walk over to her, even if he had some kind of manual.

He decided, since it was starting to get close to 8 o’clock, he should head back upstairs. He knew his boss would have walked into the office at exactly 7:30 am, and that he would be likely surveying the damage now. He would come in, still almost an hour early and looking to please, and discover, to his amazement, that the last 3 weeks of work was gone, and he would have no idea why.

In the elevator, there was a Muzak version of the theme to The Empire Strikes back, and he felt that this would be a good day after all.

The doors opened and he found that his floor was already a flurry of activity. Tech guys were walking back and forth through the different cubicles, checking computers, typing on keyboards. The door to the server room was open, and there were several people standing inside, apparently surveying the damage. He imagined what they were thinking, that there was some kind of power spike, maybe they were cursing themselves for not getting better battery back-ups.

He walked in, head held high, measuring each stride carefully so as not to look as though he was guilty of anything. His desk was straight down the main hall of offices, where all the important people worked, and around the corner into what they called the Cube Central. Stepping around his wall he found that there was someone he didn’t recognize sitting at his computer, issuing commands into a Unix Shell.

“Something wrong?” He asked, using his innocent voice.

“Something’s very wrong. I think Mr. Talbot is looking for you, you might want to find him,” the unknown person didn’t even look up from the screen, just watching a series of commands scroll by, and it struck William as strange that he knew who he was.

He was about to turn to find Mr. Talbot, his boss, when his familiar voice called from behind him, “Bill, my office, now!”

There was a dark fury in his voice, and by the time he’d turned around, his boss was already inside his office again. This is the point in the story, thought William, where one would turn and run, “but if I do that, I’ll be declaring some sort of guilt, and it will be all over.” In thinking this, he decided the best thing to be done was head straight for Mr. Talbot’s office and have a seat.

“Sit down!” barked his superior. William sat down, trying hard to look as though he had nothing to hide, telling himself, over and over, that he was a blank slate.

“What’s going on?” he asked, hoping his terror wasn’t seeping into his voice.

“That’s what I want to know! Can you shed any light on what happened with the servers this morning?”

“I’m sorry?” asked William, truly scared now.

Mr. Mark Talbot was a longtime employee and supervisor at TMS Software. He was normally an easy going guy, the kind that would rub elbows with his employees, sometimes taking them out for drinks after work. Having worked for him for the last year, William had seen him upset, even angry, but he’d never seen him like this. There was something in his eyes; a rage that he imagined came just before one might commit murder. He was certain that his boss would, at any moment, lunge across the desk and strangle him.

Instead of killing him, however, he clicked a button with his mouse and turned one of his computer monitors toward the kid sitting across from him. A video played surveillance of the server room. It was about 12 minutes of William pushing and pulling the emergency stop button on the wall. All the blood in his body, all the air in his lungs, the Macchiato he’d just drank, and the Oatmeal Squares he’d had for breakfast, all of it dropped down through him and he became an empty shell of skin.

William Esther said nothing. He just sat in the chair, completely numb. Mr. Talbot, however, seemed to take a certain satisfaction from his reaction. His demeanor changed from cold fury to smug condescension.

“You’re in a lot of trouble. I don’t just mean the fact that you’re fired, I mean, financially, and most probably criminally. The lawyers are already looking into what we’re going to do about this, exactly, but right now your best bet is to go home, and sit by the phone, because we’ll be in touch very soon.”

Mr. Talbot stood and walked around the desk to his door and opened it. William stood up, without a word, and slung his backpack over his shoulder, without a word. He left the office and walked down the hall to the elevator where he pressed the call button and stood with his nose in the door.

He stood in the elevator, staring dumbly at the doors. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything; he didn’t know how to function. He looked at the buttons, looked back at the doors, and stood there, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. Then, feeling suddenly inspired, he reached out to press the button marked L, but by the time he had done so, he was feeling a lurch in the world around him, and as he fell, his head hit the railing. Then everything was black.

He could hear people. Distantly, he could hear their voices. Concern was intermingled with frustration. He knew the voices were talking about him. The world started coming back, like the fade from black in a movie. He sat up, feeling a swelling, pulsating pain at the back of his head. He was shaking slightly, and felt a bit off balance, but overall, he was sure he would survive.

Looking around, he saw the crowd that had gathered, mostly men and women in smart looking suits. There was a range of expressions from mild curiosity to general concern. He realized that he was no longer in the elevator; that he’d been moved and was now in the common area of the office building. It was one of those architectural wet dreams of glass skylights and bizarre angles.

Craig, the security guard, was on the ground, crouched next to him.

“This is gonna be so much damn paperwork.”

He said, “Don’t get up, you clocked your head pretty good, saw it on the monitor. I got an ambulance on the way.”

William stood up anyway, stooped to pick up his bag, and swooned a little. He managed to stay upright, though, and he surveyed the crowd that stood around him, most of expressions had changes to those of rubberneckers. He turned started walking toward the door, and hear the dull murmur of surprised chatter from the people watching him walk away.

“Hold on, guy,” Craig called after him, “you shouldn’t be walking around ‘til someone’s checked you out, man!”

“I’m fine,” he just kept walking toward the revolving doors. There were stars bursting and swirling around in front of his eyes. It was like when he was a kid and would drive his fingers into his eyes lids, he thought it was so funny. Now he just wanted it to stop. He shook his head, but that just made it so much worse.

Exiting the building through the extreme discomfort of the revolving door, he found himself on the busy downtown street in the middle of the of the morning rush hour foot traffic. There were men in suits pushing past women in sport jackets, and kids on the way to the many classes in the area, most carrying books, laptop bags, and backpacks slung over their shoulders. At least half of people carried the papers cups of coffee from one of 10 corporate coffee bars within a few minute’s walk, all acting, without realizing it, as little walking billboards. At least as many were talking on cell phones, or checking text messages or emails, all through the swirling din of bodies.

In the street, cars rolled slowly along the one way, vying and fighting for position in the slow crawl that is downtown rush hour. One car would break into another lane, only to be stopped by a delivery van that stopped. Another car would move into a far lane, only to be stopped by traffic waiting to turn. It was the sort of thing that he had tried to understand for years, why people tried to drive in the city. He took the bus.

He couldn’t clear his mind. There was a wild buzz, a dull roar inside his skull. It was as if the volume of the world had been turned way up. He walked, with varying levels of success, as he swayed and stumbled through the throng of people, toward the bus stop up the street.

He still felt a kind of numbness. His job was gone. His life was basically over. There was no way that he would be able to repay the damages, knowing that his company’s legal team would nail him to the wall for it. The worst part of it was that he knew it was entirely his fault; there was no one else he could blame. And he was trying, desperately, to think of someone that he could blame.

The bus stop was an enclosed glass structure with 3 benches and a translucent white dome room that always had a dusting of dirt on it when you looked up through it. Sometimes, when he had nothing better to do when waiting for the bus, he would look up at it and try to find different shapes and things, his version of cloud watching. Encased inside the walls were various advertisements. One was for a sinus medication, another was for a lingerie store, and there were several smaller ads as well, but he had a hard time focusing on them.

He collapsed onto one of the empty benches, swinging his heavy backpack around onto his lap and dropping his head onto it. He tried to clear his mind, to stop the buzzing, what was becoming a cacophony of voices, all murmuring indistinctly through his head. He wondered if maybe he should have waited for the ambulance, then he noticed still didn’t seem to have arrived. His head throbbed.

“There’s that cute boy again, why didn’t he come talk to me?”

He heard it clearly, plainly. The voice was soft and feminine, and breathy, and he heard it as if it were speaking right into his hear. He lifted his head and looked around to find that he was no longer alone inside the bus stop. The girl he’d been staring at in the coffee shop earlier had just walked in and turned around, looking at the street. She looked the same, but now carried a bright green bag, which he assumed held her laptop. It clashed even more horribly with the pink cardigan than her scarf.

“Did you say something?” He asked her. She was looking down the street for the bus, and turned to look at him when he spoke, her face painted with a mild expression of shot.

“What? No,” she replied. Then she added, as though an afterthought, “was I supposed to.”

He’d dropped his head back into his back, and with his head still buzzing angrily, it took him a moment to process his reply, he chuckled a little, “no, I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think what,” she had a puzzled look on her face which made her face scrunch up, which he found adorable.

Feeling a bit confused himself, he shook his head and said, “Sorry, I hit my head, I think I must be hearing things.”

“Oh, that was you,” she said, “are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

She sat down on the same bench a few feet away, and watched up the street, away from him. The buzzing in his head had begun to subside, changing from a swarm of bees, to a something more like the hum of an air conditioner. He looked at her, watching for the bus. She reached up and pushed a strand of hair around her ear.

“Just ask me out already,” she said, “I know you’re watching me, just ask me out.”

This time he realized that she wasn’t actually speaking, not with words, her mouth wasn’t moving. It hit him like a slap to the face that he was hearing her thoughts. It was as though he’d seen this scene in a movie before, and figured that he probably had. He shot up from the seat and punched the air, and then dropped back down just as quickly, his head swum, but the excitement still gripped him.

She turned around to figure out what was going on, and he said abruptly, “Would you like to get some coffee with me?”

“Yes! YES! YES!” she said, without saying anything, and then she really said, feigning some level of surprise, “uh, sure.”

She stood up and walked out of the bus stop, then turned to look at him and asked, “You coming?”

He got over the shock of what he’d just done, got up, and followed her. There was another small coffee shop right behind them, not a big chain, but a smaller place that played strange transcendental music and was decorated with strange papier mache’ sculptures of unusual animals. They stood in line, and he bought her a large Chai and himself a Caramel Macchiato. She thanked him, blushing slightly, and then followed him over to a table in the corner.

They talked for a while, mostly about her since he would change the subject whenever she asked about his work. He found out a lot about her. Her name was Jill. She was a Graduate Student at a prestigious Medical University for Chemical Engineering. He found himself fascinated as she described what she did. She was living close by with a couple of roommates, neither of which were ever home, because they both had boyfriends with their own places, so she mostly had the place to herself, which was fine. He found that she had a passion for paper and pencil games, as well as a love for many authors he also enjoyed. A lot of this he gleaned from things she wasn’t saying.

They’d been talking for almost two hours when she turned the subject back on him. He was starting to feel confident in his ability to read her, and decided that he might as well go for broke. The gentle droning was still there in his head, but overall, it seemed to be getting better.

“Well, today’s been pretty shitty, to be absolutely honest. This morning I lost my job, and on the elevator I hit my head on the railing when I lost my balance.”

“But you met me,” she didn’t say.

“Of course, something good did happen today,” and he nodded toward her with a smile. She was blushed, crimson bloomed in her normally paper white cheeks, and an enormous smile broke across her face.

They chatted for a while longer, and she looked at her watch and told him that she was very late for an important class, but she’d really like it if they could continue this later. He agreed, and she gave him her phone number, and then she rushed off. He smiled as he heard the thoughts she thought about him.

His luck, he decided, was changing already. He walked through the streets, the hustle and bustle of the morning’s rush had tapered off, but the lunch crowd would be out soon. His head, he realized, was still throbbing a little, but he seemed able to read Jill’s mind. And though he knew that shit had, for him, hit the proverbial fan, he was still feeling pretty good about the world.

It was 12 blocks to his little apartment, and he was in the mood to walk, partially because of his good mood, and partially because he was really craving a gyro from a little stand about halfway between. He’d never been a fan of Greek food, but he would crave gyros from time to time, and whenever the holidays rolled around, he would find himself in the mood for baklava.

He walked along, his backpack bouncing off his lower back with each step so that he took to switching shoulders more and more frequently until he decided to just carry it by the top strap. That got tiresome though, and after a few blocks he was switching it from shoulder to shoulder every few steps again.

He loved the city. He’d grown up in the suburbs, and it wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the clean world, the quiet of the streets, the cal du sacs, but there was something about living downtown that made him happy. He never fully understood why, though, because he wasn’t one for the night life, he didn’t really have the money or the social life to enjoy the bar and restaurant scene, and he’d never taken the time to really explore all the little shops scattered around. He also couldn’t stand people in large groups, and would often feel claustrophobic on the streets during the day.

Yet, he would often just walk around the city on his lunch breaks. He wouldn’t really look at anything, or go anywhere in particular, and he thought that it was something he could probably do just as well anywhere else, but for whatever the reasons, he liked doing it downtown.

The throbbing in his head remained. He wondered if it was going to become a permanent part of his existence. The buzzing quieted, and then got louder, and it seemed to come and go like the ebb and flow of the tide. There was something about it that he almost understood, something that was there, at the front of his mind. He knew it, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

He arrived at the Gyro stand, and ordered a full pita with a side of falafel and a bottle of coke. He didn’t really like the falafel, but the combo was cheaper than just buying the sandwich and a drink. He walked over to a bench in front of the huge gothic built bank the stand stood in front of. It was one of the few landmarks in the city that he truly loved. He sat and watched the traffic and ate his gyro.

“Fucking pigs.”

He had started, near the end of his conversation with Jill, to figure out the difference between thoughts and actual verbalizations. The voice he heard now was a man. It was similar, he thought, to the man he bought the Gyro from, but it was a little different as well. It was hard to describe, but William decided he must be hearing the voice that people hear inside their heads, which is, of course, very different to the voice we hear on recordings of ourselves.

“I’m so sick and tired of these bastards. Why do I put up with this?!?”

He turned around and looked at the Gyro vendor. He was a Middle Eastern man in his late 20’s. His accent was mild, and William had assumed that he was probably second generation in the U.S. He was always a very succinct man, but pleasant overall. Presently, a man in an expensive looking business suit was berating him, loudly.

“How hard is it? I said no cucumber sauce, I get my sandwich and walk 3 feet away to find you’ve put on cucumber sauce! This is what you do for a living, right?” The man was shouting in tones of arrogance and self importance, causing a scene, and acting as though his entire world was coming apart at the seams.

The vendor stood there, trying to get a word into the exchange. His face was stony, and he seemed relatively calm, but still William could hear him, “without the sauce, it’s not a Gyro, you stupid pig, and if you hadn’t been on your phone, you might have actually told me you didn’t want the sauce!”

Finally the suit man stopped yelling long enough, and Gyro man said, “I will make another one for you, I’m sorry that you were unhappy with the first one.”

The man in the suit shouted again, “I think I should get my money back, too!”

The vendor didn’t even argue, just opened the little cash box that was welded to the metal cart and pulled out a $5 bill. He handed the bill to the man, who looked at it suspiciously for a moment, and pocketed the money. The Gyro man started making the sandwich again. First he placed the meat, then he reached for the ladle of the cucumber sauce. The man in the suit shouted a string of obscenities while throwing the first pita at the man and stormed off, meanwhile the Gyro man had moved the ladle aside to get to the lettuce and was standing with a pinch of the leafy greens in his fingers looking very much dumb founded.

As the man in the suit stomped down the street, looking like an overgrown toddler who hadn’t gotten his way, William heard him thinking various obscenities and racists thoughts about the man he’d just belittled.

“Why do we even tolerate them in this country!” he thought. “Terrorists, all of them!”

“Bastard, filthy bastard,” was what the man at the cart thought, “I can’t do this today.”

William watched him as he went around the cart, securing all of the components and padlocking it closed. He felt like he should go say something, but really didn’t know what to say. After a few minutes he just crumpled up the tinfoil and paper, and threw them into a trashcan nearby, and continued his walk home.

The buzzing in his head was becoming more of a background noise than anything. He was starting to get comfortable with it. As he passed people on the streets, he could hear their thoughts as well, some of them clear, some of them muddy.

“I can’t believe I’m late, blowjobs are not worth my job! Lunch meeting went long, it’s a big client. It will be alright.” “Foreclosure! I can’t handle that… my marriage can’t handle that.” “How did he lose the car keys?” “Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.” “She’s such a complete bitch! God!”

Suddenly, like a damn breaking, the buzzing in his head exploded, and he was hearing all the thoughts. It was like roar in a packed sports stadium when the home team scores. It was explosive, and it hurt. At first it seemed like his ears would explode, but he realized that he wasn’t really hearing it.

He didn’t notice when he dropped to his knees on the concrete of the sidewalk, clutching at the sides of his head and wincing with the pain. It seemed that no one else noticed either as people just passed him on either side, as if he weren’t there.

Then it stopped, completely. There was no buzzing, no cacophony of voices. It was all gone. There was a new pain located around his knees, but his head felt clear.

He felt relieved, and then he felt sad. He was just getting used to the idea that he’d like to hear people’s thoughts, and now it was gone, just like that.

He got up, and for the second time that day, brushed himself off. He looked around at the people, trying to hear their thoughts, but nothing came. Soon he realized that he probably looked like some kind of idiot, and decided to continue walking home.

“The wedding is in less than a month! I can’t do this!”

He turned and saw a woman with some bridal magazines under her arms rushing down the street. He heard her thoughts again, “dammit! Why won’t Mark help me with this shit!”

He went home feeling better, and happier. There was no buzz, and he still seemed to be hearing thoughts.

He walked into his apartment, dropped his backpack on the couch and went to the kitchen to get a Coke. He passed through there to his computer desk, where he clicked the mouse once and walked back to the kitchen.

He opened the freezer and took out an ancient looking ice pack, the canvas kind with the screw off top that you put the ice inside of. He got migraines sometimes, and his mom had found it at a garage sale and given it to him. She’d read somewhere that ice would help some migraines.

It never helped his migraines, but he thought it might help the swelling.

On the computer screen, there were several open chat windows, and his email program showed he had several new emails. He closed the chat windows, which were all just people he knew checking to see if he was there. Usually he’d chat with people while he was at work, something he thought, in retrospect, was probably not the best idea for his productivity.

He stared at the new email indicator, and then decided that he didn’t feel like checking them right now, and got up and went out to his living room and dropped down into the ancient green couch. Several long plumes of dust blew out and swirled around in what little afternoon sunlight managed to break through his blinds and curtains.

He pulled his backpack toward him and took his cell phone out of one of the pockets on the front. He had a few voice messages. His phone was usually set to silent because he never answered calls, just returned them. His line of thinking was that if it wasn’t important enough for them to leave a message, it wasn’t important enough to call back. He looked at the missed call list and saw that a couple of them was from his now former employer, and one was from a number he didn’t recognize.

He decided that he would check them later; right now he just wanted to stretch out on the couch, lay back, and relax. He picked up the remote and clicked on the television. A re-run of one of the modern Star Trek shows was on, but he couldn’t recognize which one because none of the main characters were on screen.

He awoke to the sound of screaming. It was piercing, and painful. Underneath the screaming was the low murmur like that of a crowd in a theater before a movie starts. He shot up from the couch. The screaming seemed to be coming from in the room, but he realized that it must be in someone’s head. He was hearing the screaming of someone, somewhere.

Then the screaming stopped. The murmur, however, continued on, getting progressively louder. It pressed in on him. He tried to concentrate, tried to hear the individual voices, but there were so many. He could catch a word here, or a phrase there, but it was impossible to single anything.

The pain in his skull threatened to break it open. He stumbled back to the bathroom and pulled out a bottle of aspirin. He popped several tabs and then stumbled toward his bed, and he stuck his head under the pillow, but it didn’t help at all.

The voiced continued to get louder. Terror started to take over. He’d never experienced anything like this. It was like those times, late at night, when you’re trying to sleep, and you find that your thoughts are coming at you, faster and faster, and you think your head is going to explode, but you can’t do anything to slow them down and focus. Out of control.

He stumbled back out to the living room and took his iPod out of his pack back. He shoved the ear buds in and turned it on. He cranked the volume up notch by notch, and near the top, the noise was drowned out, slightly, by something by Snapcase. He focused on the music and went back to his bedroom, where he promptly fell back into his bed.

He lay there, and the voices gained in volume and temper. Soon, he was huddle under the blankets, listening to the voices of people all over the place, his iPod at full blast. He couldn’t move, or function, where he could find his own thoughts among all the others, he wondered how long before it was over.

He wondered how long it would take for him to starve to death.

He wondered if his head would explode.

He wondered if he would die from it.

Eventually he worried that he wouldn’t die.

Then he wondered if he had what it took to end it himself.

Writing Project #3 - 2008_04_02

William Esther sat alone on the bed of his apartment, buried under the blankets and pillows. The headphones of his iPod crammed deep into his ears, the volume up so loud that people in neighboring units could hear the grating death metal with perfect clarity. He wanted to think about a lot of things, but his own thoughts were almost completely lost to him. What he could think, when he could grab his own thought, was that his life hadn’t been terrible. As a matter of fact, he thought that his life used to be pretty good.

Even if he didn’t think so at the time.

He showed up for work early on Tuesday. He was running way behind on his project, designing the framework for a new database system that was supposed to be deployed in a few weeks as part of a huge software project that his company was working on. This was everything that the 60 person firm had hoped for, and it was everything that the company was working on. It was the sort of contract that would catapult a firm into the spotlight. Failure, as they put it, when announcing the project, was not an option.

His boss had taken him aside to talk with him on Monday. The result of the talk was that he was very close to losing his job and that if he didn’t get the project back on track, he would find himself not only jobless, but also financially responsible for their inability to launch on time. Words like ‘inept’, and ‘pathetic’ were used. He was told that his portion of the work wasn’t that difficult, even if it was time consuming, and he clearly knew how to do his job, or they wouldn’t have hired him. He was told that he needed to get his shit together, and fast. His boss said, “For you, right now, there’s no such thing as a 40 hour work week!”

So, that Tuesday morning he was there 3 hours early, before the sun was out and before the regular commuters had choked the streets. He was going to code like a man on fire. He knew what the problem was: he was tired. His guild had been on fire in their realm, and he was logging another 25-30 hours a week with his Paladin. He had been wondering, of late, if there was some sort of 12-step program for MMORPG players, because he knew, even before his boss yelled at him, that he had a problem.

He walked into his cubicle, three 4 foot walls where he had sparsely decorated with a Dilbert calendar and a couple of Star Wars miniatures (they were Storm Troopers, his favorite characters, even before he found out they were all just clones of Jengo Fett). He was cursing the fact that they didn’t allow the coders to take their work home with them. The client wouldn’t allow them to take any of the code offsite, as part of the NDA. He wiggled his computer’s mouse while slinging his backpack off his shoulder and onto the least cluttered part of his desk. He sat in his chair, pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del on his keyboard, tapped his password in and hit enter.

Then he looked up at his screen and realized that it was still black, the small light in the corner was still a dim amber, indicating that it was still napping. He ducked down to look under the desk, the normal soft hum of his system fans weren’t there. It their place was an acrid odor, something like that after a car peels out, of burned rubber. He looked at the indicator LEDs on the machine and found that it was blinking a fast red. Dead.

He knew a few things. He knew that there was something very wrong with his computer. He knew that the IT staff wouldn’t be in the building for several hours, and he knew that he hadn’t gone through the trouble of backing up his work in over 3 weeks. The backup process wasn’t automated, and he didn’t like sitting around for an extra half an hour to an hour every day just to tell the computer what to backup and where. He saw it as an extra half hour to an hour he could be running around with his guild.

He buried his face in his hands and sighed deeply, feeling sorry for himself. In his head, he ran through the most logical options, and he came to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense to wait around to get fired.

He tried a few times to restart the machine, but it would just beep manically at him every time. He opened the case and examined the components, but everything seemed to be in place: RAM, the hard drives, the all the cables and jumpers seemed to be seated just fine. Still, out of some deep seated hope, he plugged everything back in and tried to boot the system one more time.

Red light flashed, speaker beeped, and he felt completely defeated.

There was now a little over 2 hours before anyone else would be in, and he sat at his desk, ready to cry, ready to just leave and never come back. Then something occurred to him, and he stood up quickly and rushed down the hall, toward the server room.

He stepped inside the small air conditioned room that housed several big rack servers. He surveyed all the machines for a few minutes, deciding if he was about to make a huge mistake. Somewhere, deep inside, a little voice was shouting, “No!” He ignored the voice, walked over to the wall where a huge red sign said, “Emergancy Power Cut-off” and underneath was a small handwritten sign that said, “For use in extreme (fire!) situations only! WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS!” Taking a deep breath, he pressed the button in.

He could hear the various hard drive platters grinding to a halt. He pulled out the switch and listened as the various server machines began their start up process. He pressed the switch in again, and repeated this process over and over again for about ten minutes, until he was satisfied that there was a good chance that there would be a lot of missing data on the network.

He pulled the red switch out again and listened as the machines started up. There were a few speakers that started beeping, and he felt certain that he’d accomplished what he’d needed. He left the server room, went back to his desk, scooped up his backpack and went down the elevator of the downtown office building. He would sit in the coffee shop in the sprawling common area, and he would log on to his account with his laptop, just to check how the guild was doing. And in a couple hours, he would waltz back upstairs to discover that something was wrong with his machine. Everything, he thought, would be ok.

To say that he was an awkward geek would be considered an understatement. He grew up in the late 80’s playing Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering, and Super Mario Bros. He spent the rest of his time reading Tolkein, Gaimann, and comics like Spider-Man and X-Men. He loved both Star Wars, and Star Trek, so was very versatile in conversations about either. He hung out with other geeks at school. He messed around with computers, and eventually, he discovered the world of the internet through a series of chat rooms on CompuServe at a friend’s house.

The internet meant something new to him. In the real world he was a tall, gangly, weak, and pockmarked kid named William Esther. On the internet he could be whoever, and whatever, he wanted. He told everyone how cool he was. He still played a geek online, but he played the cool geek, one that still got girls, and had all the newest hardware for his computer. He started playing games online when he was in High School, but he told everyone that he was really much older and the system administrator for a big company in the city. He had friends online that were also cool; at least they also said they were cool, and to that end, he was happy.

His real life was mild by comparison. He would carefully take photos and then use Photoshop to clean up the acne so he’d look better, similar to the way that they make fashion models look good in the nudey magazines he stole from his dad. He got into Everquest when he was in College, and nearly didn’t graduate. His transcript looked so bad that it was everything he could do to get the entry level job that he was now at risk for losing.

Sitting in the little coffee shop, drinking a steaming hot Macchiato and scrolling through message boards, he noticed a girl in the corner typing on her laptop. He watched her tapping away on the keys of the little white Mac Book, the typical white iPod ear buds stuck in her ears. She was nursing a small glass bottle of Diet Coke. Her hair was dirty blonde, and she wore a hideous combination of dirty pink Cardigan and green and white scarf. She wasn’t beautiful, not in the typical sense, but he found something about her very sensual. He began thinking, and only thinking, about what he’d say to her. His brain’s fingers worked a virtual keyboard in his mind: “Hey hottie! Mind if I PM you?”

Then she looked up at him, and for a moment, they made eye contact, which he broke out of sheer terror. He’d only ever had a couple of girlfriends, and none of them lasted long. The inevitable argument of which was more important, them or the internet, would usually end with him clacking keys alone and drinking straight from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that night.

He just couldn’t interact with people in the real world. At least, not the way that he could online. He would have loved to have just asked her if he could join her. Inside he even thought that she might want him to, but the fact remained that there was nothing in the world that could give him the courage to walk over to her, even if he had some kind of manual.

He decided, since it was starting to get close to 8 o’clock, he should head back upstairs. He knew his boss would have walked into the office at exactly 7:30 am, and that he would be likely surveying the damage now. He would come in, still almost an hour early and looking to please, and discover, to his amazement, that the last 3 weeks of work was gone, and he would have no idea why.

In the elevator, there was a Muzak version of the theme to The Empire Strikes back, and he felt that this would be a good day after all.

The doors opened and he found that his floor was already a flurry of activity. Tech guys were walking back and forth through the different cubicles, checking computers, typing on keyboards. The door to the server room was open, and there were several people standing inside, apparently surveying the damage. He imagined what they were thinking, that there was some kind of power spike, maybe they were cursing themselves for not getting better battery back-ups.

He walked in, head held high, measuring each stride carefully so as not to look as though he was guilty of anything. His desk was straight down the main hall of offices, where all the important people worked, and around the corner into what they called the Cube Central. Stepping around his wall he found that there was someone he didn’t recognize sitting at his computer, issuing commands into a Unix Shell.

“Something wrong?” He asked, using his innocent voice.

“Something’s very wrong. I think Mr. Talbot is looking for you, you might want to find him,” the unknown person didn’t even look up from the screen, just watching a series of commands scroll by, and it struck William as strange that he knew who he was.

He was about to turn to find Mr. Talbot, his boss, when his familiar voice called from behind him, “Bill, my office, now!”

There was a dark fury in his voice, and by the time he’d turned around, his boss was already inside his office again. This is the point in the story, thought William, where one would turn and run, “but if I do that, I’ll be declaring some sort of guilt, and it will be all over.” In thinking this, he decided the best thing to be done was head straight for Mr. Talbot’s office and have a seat.

“Sit down!” barked his superior. William sat down, trying hard to look as though he had nothing to hide, telling himself, over and over, that he was a blank slate.

“What’s going on?” he asked, hoping his terror wasn’t seeping into his voice.

“That’s what I want to know! Can you shed any light on what happened with the servers this morning?”

“I’m sorry?” asked William, truly scared now.

Mr. Mark Talbot was a longtime employee and supervisor at TMS Software. He was normally an easy going guy, the kind that would rub elbows with his employees, sometimes taking them out for drinks after work. Having worked for him for the last year, William had seen him upset, even angry, but he’d never seen him like this. There was something in his eyes; a rage that he imagined came just before one might commit murder. He was certain that his boss would, at any moment, lunge across the desk and strangle him.

Instead of killing him, however, he clicked a button with his mouse and turned one of his computer monitors toward the kid sitting across from him. A video played surveillance of the server room. It was about 12 minutes of William pushing and pulling the emergency stop button on the wall. All the blood in his body, all the air in his lungs, the Macchiato he’d just drank, and the Oatmeal Squares he’d had for breakfast, all of it dropped down through him and he became an empty shell of skin.

William Esther said nothing. He just sat in the chair, completely numb. Mr. Talbot, however, seemed to take a certain satisfaction from his reaction. His demeanor changed from cold fury to smug condescension.

“You’re in a lot of trouble. I don’t just mean the fact that you’re fired, I mean, financially, and most probably criminally. The lawyers are already looking into what we’re going to do about this, exactly, but right now your best bet is to go home, and sit by the phone, because we’ll be in touch very soon.”

Mr. Talbot stood and walked around the desk to his door and opened it. William stood up, without a word, and slung his backpack over his shoulder, without a word. He left the office and walked down the hall to the elevator where he pressed the call button and stood with his nose in the door.

He stood in the elevator, staring dumbly at the doors. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything; he didn’t know how to function. He looked at the buttons, looked back at the doors, and stood there, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. Then, feeling suddenly inspired, he reached out to press the button marked L, but by the time he had done so, he was feeling a lurch in the world around him, and as he fell, his head hit the railing. Then everything was black.

He could hear people. Distantly, he could hear their voices. Concern was intermingled with frustration. He knew the voices were talking about him. The world started coming back, like the fade from black in a movie. He sat up, feeling a swelling, pulsating pain at the back of his head. He was shaking slightly, and felt a bit off balance, but overall, he was sure he would survive.

Looking around, he saw the crowd that had gathered, mostly men and women in smart looking suits. There was a range of expressions from mild curiosity to general concern. He realized that he was no longer in the elevator; that he’d been moved and was now in the common area of the office building. It was one of those architectural wet dreams of glass skylights and bizarre angles.

Craig, the security guard, was on the ground, crouched next to him.

“This is gonna be so much damn paperwork.”

He said, “Don’t get up, you clocked your head pretty good, saw it on the monitor. I got an ambulance on the way.”

William stood up anyway, stooped to pick up his bag, and swooned a little. He managed to stay upright, though, and he surveyed the crowd that stood around him, most of expressions had changes to those of rubberneckers. He turned started walking toward the door, and hear the dull murmur of surprised chatter from the people watching him walk away.

“Hold on, guy,” Craig called after him, “you shouldn’t be walking around ‘til someone’s checked you out, man!”

“I’m fine,” he just kept walking toward the revolving doors. There were stars bursting and swirling around in front of his eyes. It was like when he was a kid and would drive his fingers into his eyes lids, he thought it was so funny. Now he just wanted it to stop. He shook his head, but that just made it so much worse.

Exiting the building through the extreme discomfort of the revolving door, he found himself on the busy downtown street in the middle of the of the morning rush hour foot traffic. There were men in suits pushing past women in sport jackets, and kids on the way to the many classes in the area, most carrying books, laptop bags, and backpacks slung over their shoulders. At least half of people carried the papers cups of coffee from one of 10 corporate coffee bars within a few minute’s walk, all acting, without realizing it, as little walking billboards. At least as many were talking on cell phones, or checking text messages or emails, all through the swirling din of bodies.

In the street, cars rolled slowly along the one way, vying and fighting for position in the slow crawl that is downtown rush hour. One car would break into another lane, only to be stopped by a delivery van that stopped. Another car would move into a far lane, only to be stopped by traffic waiting to turn. It was the sort of thing that he had tried to understand for years, why people tried to drive in the city. He took the bus.

He couldn’t clear his mind. There was a wild buzz, a dull roar inside his skull. It was as if the volume of the world had been turned way up. He walked, with varying levels of success, as he swayed and stumbled through the throng of people, toward the bus stop up the street.

He still felt a kind of numbness. His job was gone. His life was basically over. There was no way that he would be able to repay the damages, knowing that his company’s legal team would nail him to the wall for it. The worst part of it was that he knew it was entirely his fault; there was no one else he could blame. And he was trying, desperately, to think of someone that he could blame.

The bus stop was an enclosed glass structure with 3 benches and a translucent white dome room that always had a dusting of dirt on it when you looked up through it. Sometimes, when he had nothing better to do when waiting for the bus, he would look up at it and try to find different shapes and things, his version of cloud watching. Encased inside the walls were various advertisements. One was for a sinus medication, another was for a lingerie store, and there were several smaller ads as well, but he had a hard time focusing on them.

He collapsed onto one of the empty benches, swinging his heavy backpack around onto his lap and dropping his head onto it. He tried to clear his mind, to stop the buzzing, what was becoming a cacophony of voices, all murmuring indistinctly through his head. He wondered if maybe he should have waited for the ambulance, then he noticed still didn’t seem to have arrived. His head throbbed.

“There’s that cute boy again, why didn’t he come talk to me?”

He heard it clearly, plainly. The voice was soft and feminine, and breathy, and he heard it as if it were speaking right into his hear. He lifted his head and looked around to find that he was no longer alone inside the bus stop. The girl he’d been staring at in the coffee shop earlier had just walked in and turned around, looking at the street. She looked the same, but now carried a bright green bag, which he assumed held her laptop. It clashed even more horribly with the pink cardigan than her scarf.

“Did you say something?” He asked her. She was looking down the street for the bus, and turned to look at him when he spoke, her face painted with a mild expression of shot.

“What? No,” she replied. Then she added, as though an afterthought, “was I supposed to.”

He’d dropped his head back into his back, and with his head still buzzing angrily, it took him a moment to process his reply, he chuckled a little, “no, I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think what,” she had a puzzled look on her face which made her face scrunch up, which he found adorable.

Feeling a bit confused himself, he shook his head and said, “Sorry, I hit my head, I think I must be hearing things.”

“Oh, that was you,” she said, “are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

She sat down on the same bench a few feet away, and watched up the street, away from him. The buzzing in his head had begun to subside, changing from a swarm of bees, to a something more like the hum of an air conditioner. He looked at her, watching for the bus. She reached up and pushed a strand of hair around her ear.

“Just ask me out already,” she said, “I know you’re watching me, just ask me out.”

This time he realized that she wasn’t actually speaking, not with words, her mouth wasn’t moving. It hit him like a slap to the face that he was hearing her thoughts. It was as though he’d seen this scene in a movie before, and figured that he probably had. He shot up from the seat and punched the air, and then dropped back down just as quickly, his head swum, but the excitement still gripped him.

She turned around to figure out what was going on, and he said abruptly, “Would you like to get some coffee with me?”

“Yes! YES! YES!” she said, without saying anything, and then she really said, feigning some level of surprise, “uh, sure.”

She stood up and walked out of the bus stop, then turned to look at him and asked, “You coming?”

He got over the shock of what he’d just done, got up, and followed her. There was another small coffee shop right behind them, not a big chain, but a smaller place that played strange transcendental music and was decorated with strange papier mache’ sculptures of unusual animals. They stood in line, and he bought her a large Chai and himself a Caramel Macchiato. She thanked him, blushing slightly, and then followed him over to a table in the corner.

They talked for a while, mostly about her since he would change the subject whenever she asked about his work. He found out a lot about her. Her name was Jill. She was a Graduate Student at a prestigious Medical University for Chemical Engineering. He found himself fascinated as she described what she did. She was living close by with a couple of roommates, neither of which were ever home, because they both had boyfriends with their own places, so she mostly had the place to herself, which was fine. He found that she had a passion for paper and pencil games, as well as a love for many authors he also enjoyed. A lot of this he gleaned from things she wasn’t saying.

They’d been talking for almost two hours when she turned the subject back on him. He was starting to feel confident in his ability to read her, and decided that he might as well go for broke. The gentle droning was still there in his head, but overall, it seemed to be getting better.

“Well, today’s been pretty shitty, to be absolutely honest. This morning I lost my job, and on the elevator I hit my head on the railing when I lost my balance.”

“But you met me,” she didn’t say.

“Of course, something good did happen today,” and he nodded toward her with a smile. She was blushed, crimson bloomed in her normally paper white cheeks, and an enormous smile broke across her face.

They chatted for a while longer, and she looked at her watch and told him that she was very late for an important class, but she’d really like it if they could continue this later. He agreed, and she gave him her phone number, and then she rushed off. He smiled as he heard the thoughts she thought about him.

His luck, he decided, was changing already. He walked through the streets, the hustle and bustle of the morning’s rush had tapered off, but the lunch crowd would be out soon. His head, he realized, was still throbbing a little, but he seemed able to read Jill’s mind. And though he knew that shit had, for him, hit the proverbial fan, he was still feeling pretty good about the world.

It was 12 blocks to his little apartment, and he was in the mood to walk, partially because of his good mood, and partially because he was really craving a gyro from a little stand about halfway between. He’d never been a fan of Greek food, but he would crave gyros from time to time, and whenever the holidays rolled around, he would find himself in the mood for baklava.

He walked along, his backpack bouncing off his lower back with each step so that he took to switching shoulders more and more frequently until he decided to just carry it by the top strap. That got tiresome though, and after a few blocks he was switching it from shoulder to shoulder every few steps again.

He loved the city. He’d grown up in the suburbs, and it wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the clean world, the quiet of the streets, the cal du sacs, but there was something about living downtown that made him happy. He never fully understood why, though, because he wasn’t one for the night life, he didn’t really have the money or the social life to enjoy the bar and restaurant scene, and he’d never taken the time to really explore all the little shops scattered around. He also couldn’t stand people in large groups, and would often feel claustrophobic on the streets during the day.

Yet, he would often just walk around the city on his lunch breaks. He wouldn’t really look at anything, or go anywhere in particular, and he thought that it was something he could probably do just as well anywhere else, but for whatever the reasons, he liked doing it downtown.

The throbbing in his head remained. He wondered if it was going to become a permanent part of his existence. The buzzing quieted, and then got louder, and it seemed to come and go like the ebb and flow of the tide. There was something about it that he almost understood, something that was there, at the front of his mind. He knew it, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

He arrived at the Gyro stand, and ordered a full pita with a side of falafel and a bottle of coke. He didn’t really like the falafel, but the combo was cheaper than just buying the sandwich and a drink. He walked over to a bench in front of the huge gothic built bank the stand stood in front of. It was one of the few landmarks in the city that he truly loved. He sat and watched the traffic and ate his gyro.

“Fucking pigs.”

He had started, near the end of his conversation with Jill, to figure out the difference between thoughts and actual verbalizations. The voice he heard now was a man. It was similar, he thought, to the man he bought the Gyro from, but it was a little different as well. It was hard to describe, but William decided he must be hearing the voice that people hear inside their heads, which is, of course, very different to the voice we hear on recordings of ourselves.

“I’m so sick and tired of these bastards. Why do I put up with this?!?”

He turned around and looked at the Gyro vendor. He was a Middle Eastern man in his late 20’s. His accent was mild, and William had assumed that he was probably second generation in the U.S. He was always a very succinct man, but pleasant overall. Presently, a man in an expensive looking business suit was berating him, loudly.

“How hard is it? I said no cucumber sauce, I get my sandwich and walk 3 feet away to find you’ve put on cucumber sauce! This is what you do for a living, right?” The man was shouting in tones of arrogance and self importance, causing a scene, and acting as though his entire world was coming apart at the seams.

The vendor stood there, trying to get a word into the exchange. His face was stony, and he seemed relatively calm, but still William could hear him, “without the sauce, it’s not a Gyro, you stupid pig, and if you hadn’t been on your phone, you might have actually told me you didn’t want the sauce!”

Finally the suit man stopped yelling long enough, and Gyro man said, “I will make another one for you, I’m sorry that you were unhappy with the first one.”

The man in the suit shouted again, “I think I should get my money back, too!”

The vendor didn’t even argue, just opened the little cash box that was welded to the metal cart and pulled out a $5 bill. He handed the bill to the man, who looked at it suspiciously for a moment, and pocketed the money. The Gyro man started making the sandwich again. First he placed the meat, then he reached for the ladle of the cucumber sauce. The man in the suit shouted a string of obscenities while throwing the first pita at the man and stormed off, meanwhile the Gyro man had moved the ladle aside to get to the lettuce and was standing with a pinch of the leafy greens in his fingers looking very much dumb founded.

As the man in the suit stomped down the street, looking like an overgrown toddler who hadn’t gotten his way, William heard him thinking various obscenities and racists thoughts about the man he’d just belittled.

“Why do we even tolerate them in this country!” he thought. “Terrorists, all of them!”

“Bastard, filthy bastard,” was what the man at the cart thought, “I can’t do this today.”

William watched him as he went around the cart, securing all of the components and padlocking it closed. He felt like he should go say something, but really didn’t know what to say. After a few minutes he just crumpled up the tinfoil and paper, and threw them into a trashcan nearby, and continued his walk home.

The buzzing in his head was becoming more of a background noise than anything. He was starting to get comfortable with it. As he passed people on the streets, he could hear their thoughts as well, some of them clear, some of them muddy.

“I can’t believe I’m late, blowjobs are not worth my job! Lunch meeting went long, it’s a big client. It will be alright.” “Foreclosure! I can’t handle that… my marriage can’t handle that.” “How did he lose the car keys?” “Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.” “She’s such a complete bitch! God!”

Suddenly, like a damn breaking, the buzzing in his head exploded, and he was hearing all the thoughts. It was like roar in a packed sports stadium when the home team scores. It was explosive, and it hurt. At first it seemed like his ears would explode, but he realized that he wasn’t really hearing it.

He didn’t notice when he dropped to his knees on the concrete of the sidewalk, clutching at the sides of his head and wincing with the pain. It seemed that no one else noticed either as people just passed him on either side, as if he weren’t there.

Then it stopped, completely. There was no buzzing, no cacophony of voices. It was all gone. There was a new pain located around his knees, but his head felt clear.

He felt relieved, and then he felt sad. He was just getting used to the idea that he’d like to hear people’s thoughts, and now it was gone, just like that.

He got up, and for the second time that day, brushed himself off. He looked around at the people, trying to hear their thoughts, but nothing came. Soon he realized that he probably looked like some kind of idiot, and decided to continue walking home.

“The wedding is in less than a month! I can’t do this!”

He turned and saw a woman with some bridal magazines under her arms rushing down the street. He heard her thoughts again, “dammit! Why won’t Mark help me with this shit!”

He went home feeling better, and happier. There was no buzz, and he still seemed to be hearing thoughts.

He walked into his apartment, dropped his backpack on the couch and went to the kitchen to get a Coke. He passed through there to his computer desk, where he clicked the mouse once and walked back to the kitchen.

He opened the freezer and took out an ancient looking ice pack, the canvas kind with the screw off top that you put the ice inside of. He got migraines sometimes, and his mom had found it at a garage sale and given it to him. She’d read somewhere that ice would help some migraines.

It never helped his migraines, but he thought it might help the swelling.

On the computer screen, there were several open chat windows, and his email program showed he had several new emails. He closed the chat windows, which were all just people he knew checking to see if he was there. Usually he’d chat with people while he was at work, something he thought, in retrospect, was probably not the best idea for his productivity.

He stared at the new email indicator, and then decided that he didn’t feel like checking them right now, and got up and went out to his living room and dropped down into the ancient green couch. Several long plumes of dust blew out and swirled around in what little afternoon sunlight managed to break through his blinds and curtains.

He pulled his backpack toward him and took his cell phone out of one of the pockets on the front. He had a few voice messages. His phone was usually set to silent because he never answered calls, just returned them. His line of thinking was that if it wasn’t important enough for them to leave a message, it wasn’t important enough to call back. He looked at the missed call list and saw that a couple of them was from his now former employer, and one was from a number he didn’t recognize.

He decided that he would check them later; right now he just wanted to stretch out on the couch, lay back, and relax. He picked up the remote and clicked on the television. A re-run of one of the modern Star Trek shows was on, but he couldn’t recognize which one because none of the main characters were on screen.

He awoke to the sound of screaming. It was piercing, and painful. Underneath the screaming was the low murmur like that of a crowd in a theater before a movie starts. He shot up from the couch. The screaming seemed to be coming from in the room, but he realized that it must be in someone’s head. He was hearing the screaming of someone, somewhere.

Then the screaming stopped. The murmur, however, continued on, getting progressively louder. It pressed in on him. He tried to concentrate, tried to hear the individual voices, but there were so many. He could catch a word here, or a phrase there, but it was impossible to single anything.

The pain in his skull threatened to break it open. He stumbled back to the bathroom and pulled out a bottle of aspirin. He popped several tabs and then stumbled toward his bed, and he stuck his head under the pillow, but it didn’t help at all.

The voiced continued to get louder. Terror started to take over. He’d never experienced anything like this. It was like those times, late at night, when you’re trying to sleep, and you find that your thoughts are coming at you, faster and faster, and you think your head is going to explode, but you can’t do anything to slow them down and focus. Out of control.

He stumbled back out to the living room and took his iPod out of his pack back. He shoved the ear buds in and turned it on. He cranked the volume up notch by notch, and near the top, the noise was drowned out, slightly, by something by Snapcase. He focused on the music and went back to his bedroom, where he promptly fell back into his bed.

He lay there, and the voices gained in volume and temper. Soon, he was huddle under the blankets, listening to the voices of people all over the place, his iPod at full blast. He couldn’t move, or function, where he could find his own thoughts among all the others, he wondered how long before it was over.

He wondered how long it would take for him to starve to death.

He wondered if his head would explode.

He wondered if he would die from it.

Eventually he worried that he wouldn’t die.

Then he wondered if he had what it took to end it himself.